I'm quite naive, isn't the individual mandate being removed the reason why the premiums are going up? i.e. lots of healthy people stopped buying and thusly leaving only the expensive guys?
There were some pandemic era programs that increased the number of insured people, so it is possible things have changed since 2022. Either way, there is no evidence that the repeal of the individual mandate actually resulted in less people with health insurance.
Yes, that's a significant aspect of the problem now.
They were going up before, during, and post ACA mandate, though. They've been on an upwards march alongside the underlying per-capita healthcare costs for decades. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe... ("Total national health expenditures, US $ per capita, 1970-2022" - $2k/year --> $13k/year per person)
The point is not about insurance in general, it’s the isolation of the individual market from the pools of large employers.
Yes the healthy will always be subsidizing the rest, but it’s a specific subset of healthy bearing that burden. It’s not the system as a whole.
> The US needs a proper public healthcare system. Good luck finding a way to make that happen though.
Ban corporate self insured policies so that the risk pools are unified to contain everyone.
Eliminate the deduction for offering insurance. Right now the same policy is cheaper if paid by the company as its pretax dollars (vs after tax dollars for an individual policy).
