Obamacare Saved Americans $2.1 Billion in 2012

[Q JINN]

Insurers Aren't Just Giving Out Rebate Checks Because Of Obamacare —
They're Lowering Premiums, Too

- Americans who bought individual health plans in 2012 saved $2.1
billion thanks to Obamacare consumer protections that limit how much
insurers can profit off of Americans' premiums, according to a new study
by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).

The vast majority of those savings stem from individual health plan
providers lowering the premiums they charge Americans in an effort to
comply with the reform law.

The Kaiser study comes shortly after several major California insurers
announced that they would have to pay back $36 million to small
businesses and their employees after charging them too much.

Obamacare mandates that insurers on the individual market spend at least
80 percent of the premiums they charge on actual medical services, or
reimburse the amount they overspent to their customers.

But insurers can avoid writing those checks after-the-fact if they just
lower their premiums to begin with — and KFF's study concludes that's
what many individual plan providers have been doing. KFF estimates that
individual market insurers lowered their premiums by $856 million in
2011 and by $1.9 billion in 2012 to comply with the so-called "80/20
rule".

SEE GRAPH of savings because of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare):
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/individual_market_mlr_savings-e1370622377752.png

The combination of these premium savings and rebate checks meant that
Americans who bought their own insurance spent 7.5 percent less on their
coverage in 2012 than they would have without Obamacare's consumer
protections.

That's an important victory for consumers since individual insurance
plans tend to offer meager benefits at high prices, especially to sick
Americans.

Obamacare will also change that status quo soon enough. Once the law's
main provisions go live in 2014, individual and small group health plans
sold on its statewide insurance marketplaces must offer ten "essential
health benefits" to consumers, including for mental health care,
prescription drug, and maternity services.

Initial insurer bids for the marketplaces in several states have
indicated that premiums will be affordable, and even lower than what
many plans currently charge for far worse coverage.

~~ Links included here:
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/individual_market_mlr_savings-e1370622377752.png