Obamacare unsustainable

Remember Brad telling us the Swamp can bend the cost curve? Pelosi never considered it, the plan all along was to drive medical costs up

AL com: Executives at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama are predicting losses of $135 million in 2015, mostly due to the costs of insuring patients who gained coverage under Obamacare.

The insurance company has already tallied losses of $109 million through the end of October. The final results will be available at the beginning of March, according to a statement released by the company.

"Beginning in 2014, the ACA eliminated health underwriting and waiting periods for pre-existing conditions allowing individuals to buy healthcare coverage regardless of their health condition," read a statement from spokeswoman Koko Mackin. "Company data indicates that many of our new individual ACA customers have used an extensive amount of medical services, which is causing total claims paid and their related operating expenses to exceed premiums."

Customers who became insured through the Affordable Care Act have been older and sicker than average. According to Blue Cross, they have drug costs that are 25 percent higher than other customers, and costs that are 50 percent higher for outpatient surgeries and hospitalizations.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama joins several other Blue Cross plans across the country that have reported steep losses in the last two years. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina reported losses of $400 million in the first two years of the Affordable Care Act. That insurer has cut sales commissions and advertising for Obamacare plans. Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Mexico pulled individual plans from the health insurance exchange after regulators denied a 53 percent rate increase.

We have more costs detailed in  this study:

The dependent care mandate is one of the most popular provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). This provision requires that employer-based insurance plans cover health care expenditures for workers with children 26 years old or younger. While there has been considerable scholarly and policy interest in the effects of this mandate on health insurance coverage among young adults, there has been little scholarly work measuring the costs and incidence of this mandate and who pays the costs of it. In our empirical work, we exploit the fact that some states had dependent care mandates in years prior to the passage of the ACA. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we find that workers at firms with employer-based coverage – whether or not they have dependent children – experience an annual reduction in wages of approximately $1,200. 

No $1200 is over 2% of consumer spending.  Just one mandate.  Add in the 30% premium increases to cover Pelosi's late arrivals, mostly in California and New York.  Then add in the implied progressive tax hit.  In some cases I am double counting, but the effect is clear, discretionary consumer spending is gone, and that is a government induced recession.