California\u2019s Obamacare-aligned health insurance exchange will not bail out President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
Data released<\/a> by Covered California, the state\u2019s exchange, explains why.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople between the ages of 45 and 64 have enrolled in California\u2019s health exchange at a much higher rate than their overall portion of the state\u2019s total population, while younger adults\u2019 enrollment levels essentially track their overall population,\u201d reports CNBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the trend holds up, it could mean that insurance plans are overweighted with older customers, and underweighted with younger, presumably healthier people. Since their premiums are much needed to offset the cost of benefits paid out to sicker individuals, that could lead to higher premium prices in 2015.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, Covered California \u2013 like any other Obamacare exchange \u2013 can\u2019t afford President Obama\u2019s costly \u2018fix\u2019 that would allow young and healthy people to keep their pre-Obamacare insurance plans and stay out of the post-Obamacare risk pools. As I explain in my column this week, doing so would lead to the dreaded \u2018death spiral\u2019<\/a> that will doom the Obamacare exchanges.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no other way to say it. California\u2019s refusal to go along with Obamacare\u2019s latest \u2018fix\u2019 is a huge blow to President Obama. So far, the Golden State is home to the most Obamacare-related enrollments, so if it\u2019s afraid that adopting Obama\u2019s enforcement delay will put its fiscal sustainability in jeopardy, it\u2019s hard to see how any other state that\u2019s serious about the issue will disagree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" California\u2019s Obamacare-aligned health insurance exchange will not bail out President Barack Obama. Data released by Covered California, the state\u2019s exchange, explains why. \u201cPeople between the ages of 45 and 64 have enrolled in California\u2019s health exchange at a much higher rate than their overall portion of the state\u2019s total population, while younger adults\u2019 enrollment levels […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[299,3007,3308,1829,24,35],"class_list":["post-19540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-california","tag-exchange","tag-health","tag-insurance","tag-obama","tag-obamacare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19540"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19546,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19540\/revisions\/19546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}