President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform is simultaneously raising the cost of insurance and cutting the work week for college graduates, thereby making it more difficult for college students and recent grads to acquire affordable healthcare and earn a living, studies show.
For example, in Missouri, the price of health care is reaching stratospheric levels.
Show-Me Institute policy analyst Patrick Ishmael, using a Forbes’ insurance rate aggregator, found that a 27 year-old man in Buchanan County can expect an individual insurance policy rate increase of a whopping 411 percent, a number likely to increase for those younger than 27.
Indeed, Missouri has the highest insurance rate increases for young men in the country, Forbes reports.
The numbers are a sobering reminder of the impact that President Obama’s signature legislature – the Affordable Care Act – is having on insurance policies for young people. Obama’s critics have, since the ACA’s creation, warned that the law would drive up the cost of insurance – now critics have been proven correct.
“Among men, the county with the greatest increase in insurance prices from 2013 to 2014 was Buchanan County, Missouri, about 45 miles north of Kansas City: 271 percent,” according to Forbes’ number cruncher Avik Roy.
His overall analysis of 3,137 counties found Obamacare increased individual-market premiums by an average of 49 percent. The numbers were culled using Forbes’ national rate navigator, which allows people to see what Obamacare is doing to insurance rates in their section of the country.
In short, the cost of health care more than tripled over the course of a year, leading some to question whether the cost might be higher for a young professional just out of college.
Obamacare advocates have argued that expanding Medicaid can stem the skyrocketing cost of health care.
To wit, earlier this year, the University of Missouri reported that Missouri would lose out on $1.13 billion in federal funding to expand Medicaid – and thereby fully implementing Obamacare in the state this year to an additional 300,000 Missourians. The University of Missouri used research from a University of Missouri School of Medicine 2012 policy analysis to generate those numbers.
According to Sidney Watson, a professor at Saint Louis University’s School of Law and a health care specialist, the expansion “would have created 24,000 new jobs and saved hundreds of others.”
“Not passing this will also very severely hurt our economy, leading to lost jobs and economic activity — we have already seen over 1,000 jobs lost and more jobs will be lost,” Tim McBride, health policy analyst and professor at Washington University, also told the St. Louis Business Journal.
But in reality, the cost of Medicaid expansion to the state of Missouri, Ishmael posits, in the event that it passes, would be a loser for state’s taxpayers and recipients in general.
Indeed, according to a blog post by the Show-Me Institute, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that if Missouri had expanded Medicaid under the ACA, “the state would spend more than $1 billion between 2013 and 2022 on just the newly eligible enrollees. In addition, the state would spend another $1.6 billion over that period on currently eligible enrollees who would come into the program as a result of the government’s enrollment push.”
College Fix contributor Christopher White is a University of Missouri graduate student and an editorial assistant for The College Fix.
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