subject: Are Texas Health Insurance Plan Premiums Increasing? [print this page] The Affordable Care Act was created to provide health care to millions of people without health insurance plans. It is designed to protect them with with access to health care before and after they get sick. However, with the ever increasing premiums of Texas health insurance plans, will customers be able to afford coverage?
Texas Health Insurance Premium Hikes Must Be Reviewed
Texas lawmakers and business owners believe in low regulation and free markets. However, they don't have the power to reject excessive proposed rate hikes by insurance companies. They only have the power to review proposed TX health insurance rate increases greater than 10 percent.
Sad to say, Texas does not bother conducting rate reviews unless they see an increase of 50 percent every year. If this continues to happen, the high number of the uninsured in Texas will exponentially grow with every year that passes. With this, you can really see the role of a limited government in Texas.
According to a federal grant application filed in 2010, the Texas Department of Insurance only allots less than 1 percent of its $104 million budget to review rates for health coverage. Here, you can clearly see that this is not the number one priority of the agency.
Under the new health care reform law, a proposed increase of 10 percent or more for health insurance warrants a rate review. Through this rate review process, it will provide public transparency and accountability. It will also ensure that people are getting some value from their monthly premiums paid to insurance companies. If the state's insurance department determined that proposed increases were indeed unjust, the insurance company would need to publicly justify why they made such a rate increase.
Just last week, Aetna announced that premiums for small group health insurance plans in Texas will increase from 12.5 to 13.1 percent starting April 1, 2012. More than 95,000 people will be affected if this rate hike is pushed through.
The health care law requires that the reviews on healthcare premiums be posted on a regular basis on their website. The reviews need to include the explanation of the insurance company for the proposed increase, a breakdown of how the money will be spent, and the rate changes in the last three years to serve as a basis.
However, even though the state has the power to review rate hikes, it does not have the power to stop them. Meaning, if insurance companies wanted to push through a rate increase even if found unreasonable, the public cannot do anything about it. This will greatly affect residents buying individual and small group Texas health insurance plans compared to those large group plans.
According to one Cigna policy, two TX plan holders face a 44 percent increase in their premiums. In the past three years, that follows an increase of 35 percent, 29 percent and 24 percent. As for Aetna's plan holders, premiums increased by 25 percent in the last three years.
Although some of the rate reviews in Texas had a positive effect on consumers (insurance companies delaying or withdrawing rate hikes), it is still is not enough to stop the record high premium increases on health care plans.
Will The Health Care Reform Law Change The Way People Get Texas Health Insurance In 2014?
A lot of people are expecting healthcare to be more affordable once the Affordable Care Act is in full swing in 2014. By that time, people can buy health coverage through the state based health insurance exchanges that will offer affordable rates to individuals and small businesses. In these exchanges, the benefits of the plans will be standardized. Therefore, people can just do some comparison shopping to check which insurance company provides the lowest rates.
by: Wiley Long
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