Sure, doom has been predicted at every turn, but it’s hard to look at this and keep on screaming that the sky is falling:
Sure, you could focus on Tennessee and shout about it’s 8.7% increase in rates, but that’s actually not a crazy outlier in terms of premium increases for private insurance, even before the ACA went into effect. Overall, this chart looks pretty balanced to me, and you wouldn’t be too far off in claiming that overall premium increases were pretty small, if there at all. The average increase was negative.
But what you can’t do is look at this and claim that the ACA has led to massive increases. You can’t scream that rate shock is happening rampantly. You can’t assert that Obamacare is the worst thing to happen to America – ever. Or, maybe you can. But you’ll have pretty much no evidence to assert that.
