Optimistically, it was supposed to make sure companies weren’t just hiking premiums to pad their bottom line.
Realistically, it’s just meant that companies have seemingly reverse-engineered the necessary rate hike to get the desired amount of additional money each year out of that permissible 20% “profit and operations” overhead, on top of the ever-increasing actual costs of health care. Hooray?
As necessary and ultimately timid of a first step as the ACA was, the only thing worse than leaving it in place as-is forever is repealing it, which is all the Republicans have ever offered to do. They’ve had almost 8 years to tell us what they want to do, and insurance companies have had almost 8 years to not act like complete dickheads. Time’s up.
