OBAMA’S LEAKY LEGACY
Next prez has to plug health care holes
WASHINGTON — The Obamacare system is so broken, even media conference calls about it can’t go off without a hitch.
When I tried to dial in yesterday for the Health and Human Services Department’s announcement of another series of Obamacare premium hikes — doubledigits, this time — all I could hear was faint noises from a handful of other reporters who were also stuck in the purgatory of a press call gone technically wrong.
It was actually quite fitting: So many things about the health care law, which was sold as a way to provide affordable health care to all, have gone very wrong.
And I’m not just a reporter who writes about Obamacare. I am also a customer.
I live in the Washington area, outside the reach of the Boston Herald’s employee plan, so like millions of Americans I opted to procure my coverage by logging on to healthcare.gov to purchase a plan from the federal exchange.
And like millions of others, I learned that next year I’ll have a 15 percent hike in my premium, bringing the total increase in cost for my plan to a whopping 55 percent since 2014. This is in addition to the hundreds of dollars in out-of-pocket costs I pay with nearly every doctor’s visit.
The Herald reimburses about half the cost of my premiums. But like many middle-class folks, I don’t qualify for a tax subsidy. So my choices are to choose a cheaper, lower quality plan — and be forced to give up my doctor — or pay up. And I’m lucky. According to HHS officials, next year’s premiums for midlevel federal marketplace health care plans like mine increase an average of 25 percent. And 28 percent of insurers now serving that system will pull out, giving enrollees fewer places to shop around. Those on state exchanges such as the Connector in Massachusetts are also in for sticker shock.
This is precisely the problem Bill Clinton highlighted earlier this month — landing him in hot water with his wife’s presidential campaign because of its inconvenient accuracy.
“So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half,” Clinton said at a Democratic rally in Flint, Mich. “It’s the craziest thing in the world.”
The Clinton camp played cleanup, getting the former president to walk back his statement. But the next president will have a harder job: actually fixing the mess Obamacare has left for the middle class.