Earlier quoted context omitted.
It did none of those things. It was cheaper and had lower deductibles for young families with practically no prior exposure to the health system. But if you were older, or were a woman who had ever seen a reproductive health specialist, or had at any point in your past had an unexplained seizure, or had reported any of a constellation of 10 different symptoms predictive of a future diabetic condition (and so and so f…
One thing I wonder about ACA: it seems like the young/healthy who bought their own insurance have had their premiums go way up compared to before (and also they are penalized if they don't buy insurance, so presumably more of them buy it now), and I haven't heard about any large groups of people whose premiums went down. So, more money is going into the system than before. Where is the extra money going? Here are the…
* It introduced tens of millions of formerly uninsured people to the system; if you were previously uninsured, you're also more likely to be costly to insure (there's a correlation between being stably employed and being healthy, for instance, and the stably employed have always tended to have insurance)
* It required insurers to cover without caps or recission and for policies to have minimal actuarial value to customers, all of which were levers that insurers used to lower premiums in exchange for reduced service to customers.
To believe that ACA red tape was a primary driver for increased premiums, you have to ignore the ratio of money insurers spend on medical costs versus administrative overhead, which is reported annually. It's hard to see how anything in the ACA could have driven up the cost of an doctors visit or an MRI. And yet that's where the expense is growing: to wit, more people are getting more procedures now that they have coverage.