Health insurance premiums for 2018 are on the rise for many, and for that, most of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of President Trump.
In recent days, a bevy of insurers have announced significant increases for Americans who purchase their coverage on the exchanges: a minimum of 12.5 percent by Covered California, 34 percent by Anthem in Kentucky and 43.5 percent by Medica in Iowa, to name just a few.
Still more hikes may come from these insurers and others, who cite uncertainty around the Affordable Care Act as the principal culprit in this disturbing trend.
Reinforcing these developments is an analysis by Charles Gaba of acasignups.net, who projected that at the moment, average premium increases next year are likely to total around 29 percent.
Of that, just 8 percentage points will result from medical inflation, and 2 percentage points will stem from the reinstatement of an Obamacare health insurance tax; the balance will be related to the uncertainty that Mr. Trump has created around key pieces of Obamacare.
The largest portion of the total — about 15 percentage points — is connected to the potential demise of the cost-sharing reductions (known as C.S.R.s), payments made by the government to insurers to help cover out-of-pocket costs like co-pays and deductibles that lower-income Americans can’t afford.
(The Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday that premiums for the most popular health insurance plans would rise by 20 percent next year, and federal budget deficits would increase by $194 billion in the coming decade, if Mr. Trump ends the subsidies.)
Those subsidies, which were created by the Obama health care legislation and which benefit seven million Americans, have been in limbo since House Republicans sued in 2014, contending that they needed to be appropriated by Congress, which wasn’t going to happen as long as Republicans controlled each chamber.