That predicted double-digit rise in Obamacare premiums? Not happening

Another stake in the heart of a popular anti-Obamacare claim has arrived from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which compiled the projected premium changes for 2015 in 15 states and the District of Columbia.

Its finding is that premiums for the lowest-cost, most popular individual health plans will be dropping for next year, by a nationwide average of 0.8%. (See accompanying graphic.)

That’s just one of several indicators recently released that demonstrate that the Affordable Care Act is working as planned and that the parade of horribles so deeply relished by its opponents hasn’t materialized. The other metrics show that out-of-pocket spending on healthcare fell in the last year because of the legislation, and that there is no overall shift in the U.S. to part-time work, whether because of healthcare reform or otherwise. More on those figures in a moment.

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Cynthia Cox, Larry Levitt and their colleagues examined rate changes in 16 major cities, which they used as proxies for their states; these were the areas where they could find comprehensive rate information for the coming year. They looked at the premiums for the lowest-cost bronze plan, which offers the lowest level of coverage, and the two lowest-cost silver plans.

The latter are key because 65% of enrollees via the federal and state insurance exchanges choose silver plans, and they’re a benchmark for calculating federal premium subsidies. Moderating or reducing their premiums saves money not only for their enrollees, but for the government.

The premium changes for 2015 ranged from an increase of 8.7% in Nashville to a drop of 15.6% in Denver. In Los Angeles, the proxy for California, average premiums are to rise by 0.8%. These are rates before subsidies are applied.

Compare that with the scare headlines we were seeing as recently as May. The Hill, a journal aimed at members of Congress and their staffs, screamed, “ObamaCare premiums may see double-digit rise.”

The Kaiser analysts list three major factors in the premium pattern. First, insurers know a lot more about the individual market’s demographics now than they did a year ago, so they’re better at estimating their costs. Second, insurers expect future enrollees to be healthier on the whole than the first wave, which included a larger share of purchasers whose conditions had shut them out of affordable health plans and therefore whose needs were more urgent.

Finally, competition: “Now that insurers have been able to see what their competitors are charging,” the Kaiser study says, “they are making strategic adjustments in how they price,” presumably to gain market share. In 10 of the states, the number of insurers participating in the exchange market is increasing for 2015. So much for the notion that the insurance industry would be shunning the exchanges.

As for those other Obamacare metrics, Friday’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics debunks once again the claim that employers are turning full-time workers into part-timers to evade the healthcare law’s employer mandate.

This became a popular theme earlier this summer, when the number of “involuntary” part-timers spiked by 275,000 in June. Billionaires Mortimer Zuckerman (in the Wall Street Journal) and Charles Koch (in USA Today) went to town on these numbers, saying they showed that Obamacare was among the policies giving businesses “a powerful incentive to hire two part-time people to do one full-time job,” in Koch’s words.

As I pointed out in response, what the billionaires overlooked was that part-time jobs customarily spike in the early summer, when college and high-school students enter the vacation workforce. Sure enough, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that by the end of August, the June spike was almost all gone, as one would expect.

The number of people working part-time “for economic reasons” -- that is, the category that would encompass an Obamacare effect -- declined last month by 234,000, to 7.28 million. It’s now only about 8,000 workers higher than it was in May, before the spike that so rattled (or delighted) Messrs. Zuckerman and Koch. It’s also about 621,000 lower than a year ago. Over the same period, total employment has increased by about 2.2 million.

If the billionaires still want to claim that Obamacare is driving employment to the part-time category, they’ll have to show their math.

Finally, there are the statistics on out-of-pocket spending. These come from the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (h/t Dylan Scott).

The agency’s actuaries, writing in the journal Health Affairs, project that out-of-pocket healthcare spending will fall by 0.2% this year, compared with 2013. That may not sound like much, but it’s a big change from 2013, when out-of-pocket spending rose by 3.2%, and from earlier years. And it’s unmistakably an effect of the Affordable Care Act -- the analysts attribute it to “expanded insurance coverage through Medicaid and the Marketplaces.”

They say this category of spending will be higher next year, though still lower than the long-term trend, and may continue to rise in 2020 and beyond primarily because of “faster growth in disposable personal income,” which drives higher healthcare spending. But they say that over the long term, out-of-pocket spending will fall as a share of overall healthcare spending, in part because expanded health insurance will relieve more Americans of the burden.

Keep up to date with The Economy Hub by following @hiltzikm