Even In Over-Regulated Washington State, Obamacare Will Increase Individual Health Insurance Premiums By 34-80% Avik Roy, Contributor
For all the talk about rate shock—next year’s Obamacare-induced spike in health insurance prices—there are a few states where you’d think rate shock shouldn’t happen. In Maine, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, and Washington, insurance markets are already regulated in much the same way that Obamacare will. These states force insurers to cover everyone, despite pre-existing conditions, and they oblige carriers to charge similar rates to younger and older customers. Despite these factors, it turns out that in Washington state, Obamacare will still increase the underlying cost of individually purchased health insurance by 34 to 80 percent, on average.
As I described in an article last year, the Evergreen State blew up its individual health insurance market in 1993, when Democrats instituted a set of reforms modeled after Hillary Clinton’s plan for universal coverage. The state instituted guaranteed issue (barring insurers from excluding pre-existing conditions), community rating (the young subsidizing the old), premium price controls, and planned to phase in employer and individual mandates to purchase health insurance. It mandated the benefits that each plan must carry, and raised taxes to subsidize the purchase of these insurance plans by low-income state residents.
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