Obamacare premiums will rise 6 percent next year because President Donald Trump's administration did not expand access to the lower-priced plans, the Washington Examiner reports.
Analysis from Kaiser Family Foundation released Thursday shows the administration's "Repealing the mandate penalty and expanding the availability of short-term plans and association health plans effectively siphons healthy people from the [Obamacare] marketplaces, driving up premiums as insurers' risk pools include a larger share of sick people relative to healthier ones."
Kaiser also found the higher premiums were partly due to the Trump administration's decision to cease payments to insurers known as cost-sharing reduction payments, which helped make up for the money insurance companies were spending on low-income customers under Obamacare.
"The stripping of federal payments that insurers used under the ACA to lower the cost-sharing burden of some customers caused insurers to raise premiums to recover costs that they subsequently had to bear themselves, in many cases increasing premiums only for silver plans," referring to the most popular tier of Obamacare insurance plans.
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