If you work for a small business, your next health insurance premium may give you sticker shock.
Many of the small-business and individual insurance policies are working the health reform law’s 2014 fees into their 2013 bills, contributing to double-digit premium increases for some people.
All those new consumer benefits packed into the health reform law — birth control without a co-pay, free preventive care and limits on when insurers can turn down a customer — had to be paid for somehow.
So the law’s drafters included a new tax on health insurers, starting at $8 billion in 2014 and increasing to $14 billion within four years, to help meet the new expenses. And insurers in 2014 will also have to pay a “reinsurance contribution” to cushion health plans that end up with a lot of sick customers under new rules requiring them to cover people with pre-existing conditions.
Gov. Mary Fallin (R-OK) Heather Shumaker, author of It's Ok Not to Share...and Other Renegade Rules Ken Johnson, News Director, KOKC Oklahoma William Kristol, founder & editor, The Weekly Standard
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