Kerby Anderson

One of the issues that the next president and the next Congress must address is health care and insurance. Most Americans are facing sticker shock as many of them discover that their premiums have increased and their coverage has decreased. A few weeks ago we saw headlines reporting that ObamaCare premiums will soar 25 percent on average next year. Actually, it was worse than the headlines might indicate. The rate spike was for the cheaper “silver” plans. Moreover, some face even more significant increases. A 27-year-old buying a plan in Arizona faced an increase of 116 percent. Huge increases could also be found in Oklahoma (69%), Tennessee (53%), and Minnesota (59%). Federal officials also confirmed that nearly one in five people in the states that use HealthCare.gov must shop from only one insurer. While a few (15) new insurers will enter the exchanges in 2017, many more (83) insurers are dropping off the marketplaces. When he was out on the campaign trail, former president Bill Clinton criticized the signature legislation of President Barack Obama. “So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.” Over the next few months and years, we will hear two significantly different solutions being proposed. One has been to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in an effort to bring competition back into the marketplace. The other will be to travel further down the road to more government intervention into health care leading to a nationalized system of health insurance. Of course, there will be many who will argue that we need to only make small changes to our current law. But Americans are paying more and more for less and less. It is time for a fundamental redesign of a system that is obviously not working.