Obamacare crashes State’s budgets…It’s gonna be bad!

The system will fall apart within the next year as states find out Medicaid will be a 2017 budget buster! Worse yet, The American Citizen and tax payer will be footing the bill for illegal aliens that are flooding the U.S. So Americans go broke, and illegals get medical treatment!

The worst of ObamaCare is yet to come

By Post Editorial Board

NY POST

October 25, 2016 | 8:41pm

Word that ObamaCare premiums will soar 25 percent in the 39 states that operate off the federal healthcare.gov system is only the tip of the iceberg: The so-called Affordable Care Act is inflicting damage all across America’s health-care sector — with no end in sight.

Just as critics warned from the start.

Premiums are rising in nearly all the states that run their own exchanges, too. And if you get other coverage, you’re also paying: ObamaCare taxes non-exchange health plans to help pay for the subsidies that make its policies (somewhat) affordable. (It also cut tens of billions from Medicare.)

This, on top of the regulations that impact policies across America — boosting costs by mandating added coverage, whether you want it or not. The move forced insurers to cancel coverage for 6 million-plus people — even as tens of millions found that, no, they couldn’t keep their doctor after all.

More, the law also pushed consolidation — penalizing doctors who stay in independent practice, rewarding hospitals that merge. All because the liberals who wrote the law saw such competition as destructive.

Oh, and the nonprofit “insurance cooperatives” created with tens of billions in federal funds have nearly all failed.

Still ahead: Budget crises in the states that accepted temporary federal bribes to massively expand their Medicaid rolls. More premium hikes on the exchanges, as ever fewer healthy people sign up for coverage — prompting even lower enrollment, and more price hikes, in a sharp “death spiral.”

The “Cadillac tax” will kick in soon, too — so if your union has won great health coverage at the bargaining table, that plan will pay a penalty to Uncle Sam.

The legal challenges aren’t done yet, either.

How did it come to this? Voter fury in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis gave Democrats huge majorities in Congress — and President Obama took the opportunity to chase a decades-old liberal dream, universal health insurance.

The law’s fallen far short of that goal, as it’s faltered on every other front, because it was never really written to work, but assembled from the wish-lists of various left-wing wonks and ideologues — hastily stitched together and passed before the voters could stop it.

The Democrats didn’t even blink when Massachusetts, of all states, elected a Republican to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in a giant cry of “stop”: They passed the law before Scott Brown could take office.

Now ObamaCare is collapsing, and presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton vows to “fix” it with new spending and even more Washington control of the market. If she gets Democratic majorities in Congress, she’ll keep that promise — and the madness will grow.

STICKER SHOCK AS OBAMACARE PREMMIUMS SKYROCKET IN 2017!

As Insurers drop Obamacare patients rates increase, deductables rise at least 10%! Good Going Barry!

OBAMACARE PREMIUMS MAY RISE BY 10% IN 2017—HERE'S WHY

BY SEAN WILLIAMS ON 8/14/16 AT 6:50 PM

This article was originally published on the Motley Fool. 

Get ready, because the 2017 enrollment period for Obamacare—officially known as the Affordable Care Act—is right around the corner.

Slated to begin on Nov. 1, 2016, the enrollment process for Obamacare could come with a sticker shock this year. Based on early rate request indications from individual state press releases, and an analysis conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation of 14 major cities in mid-June, the average Obamacare healthcare premium in the U.S. could be headed higher by at least 10 percent in 2017.

It's hard to pick out a single culprit, as nearly every state that's reported insurer rate hike requests thus far has an average or weighted increase north of 10 percent. In virtually every state a big premium hike appears likely. Here are the four reasons why your Obamacare healthcare premium is probably going up by at least 10 percent next year.

Not enough young adult enrollment

The first big problem for Obamacare is that it hasn't attracted the most sought after customers: healthier young adults. Since young adults are less likely to go to the doctor, or to need expensive medical care, their premiums are used—and needed—to offset the costs to treat older and often sicker individuals. Although young adult enrollment improved in 2016 from the previous year, there are still not enough young adults enrolled in Obamacare to make a favorable difference for insurers.

Two factors explain the weakness in young adult enrollment. To a lesser extent, the "invincibility" factor is playing a role. Young adults who feel healthy and/or don't visit their doctor regularly would just as soon not be insured. Reaching this "invincible" crowd of young adults could prove tough for Obamacare.

But I believe the bigger factor is that the Shared Responsibility Payment, or SRP, isn't an adequate incentive to coerce young adult enrollment. The SRP is the penalty you pay for violating the individual mandate and not buying health insurance. In 2014, the SRP averaged only $150 per noncompliant person based on data from  H&R Block. In 2016, the Kaiser Family Foundation believes the average SRP could rise to $969. While a lot higher, $969 is still far less than the cost of the cheapest bronze marketplace plan in any given state. Until the SRP is more closely reflective of annual bronze-level plan costs, a sizable number of young adults could stay on the sidelines.

Obamacare enrollees are sicker and costlier

Secondly, insurers have discovered that Obamacare enrollees tend to be both sicker and costlier than most other types of enrollees.

According to a study conducted by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association in April, after analyzing the medical claims of roughly 25 million employer-based group members, the average cost per member was $457 a month through the first nine months of 2015. Comparatively, analyzing 4.7 million individual Obamacare enrollees produced a monthly cost of $559 over the first nine months of 2015. That works out to a 22 percent increase over employer-based membership.

The reason insurers are coping with substantially higher costs for Obamacare enrollees is actually pretty easy to understand. Prior to Obamacare's implementation, insurers had the ability to handpick who they'd insure. This meant people with pre-existing conditions, who were potentially costly for insurers to treat, could be legally denied coverage. However, under Obamacare insurers aren't allowed to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. When Obamacare became the health law of the land, Americans who'd been ostracized from the healthcare network for having pre-existing conditions flooded back in, leading to adverse selection for insurers. Compounded with too few young adults enrolling, this has led to high medical costs, and even losses, for many insurers operating on Obamacare's marketplace exchanges.

The risk corridor was a failure

Thirdly, the risk corridor proved to be an utter failure.

The risk corridor represented a type of risk-pooling fund among insurance companies operating on the Obamacare marketplace exchanges. Here's how it worked: Insurers that were excessively profitable would be required to put some of those excess profits into a fund. In turn, insurers that were losing excessive amounts of money because they priced their premiums too low would be able to request funds from this risk corridor in order to stay afloat. In effect, the risk corridor was designed to promote competition, especially among new insurers in the individual market, and give insurance companies a year or two to find the sweet spot when it came to pricing their premiums.

Unfortunately, the risk corridor ran into plenty of issues. Just $362 million wound up being added because most insurance companies weren't overly profitable. In contrast, insurers wound up requesting $2.87 billion from the risk corridor to cover big losses. With only 12.6 percent of requested funds being paid out, many smaller insurers were forced to close up shop, including 16 of Obamacare's 23 approved healthcare cooperatives, or co-ops. Co-ops are run by the people, for the people, and they're a nice low-cost alternative to perceived-to-be profit-hungry national insurers. With these low-cost options disappearing at an alarming rate, insurance premiums have begun to adjust higher.

The other risk corridor issue stems from the federal government purportedly changing its stance on funding the risk corridor. In an ongoing suit against the federal government, insurance provider Highmark contends that the federal government initially offered to fund the risk corridor even if excess profits from insurers didn't meet loss request demands. The government supposedly changed its stance on this point, and instead ran the risk corridor as a budget-neutral program, meaning the only money paid out is what was collected from overly profitable insurers.

Long story short, the failure of the risk corridor decimated the low-cost co-ops and discouraged new entrants into the individual market.

There are fewer choices among insurers

The final reason your premiums are soaring relates to a declining number of insurer options to choose from. As noted above, the failure of the risk corridor has eliminated more than two-thirds of the available healthcare cooperatives, and there may be more failures to come. But it's not just low-cost options that are bowing out.

UnitedHealth Group announced earlier this year that it could lose up to $500 million from its Obamacare plans in 2016. This comes after more than $400 million in losses from its Obamacare plans in 2015. Finding Obamacare to be more trouble than it's worth, UnitedHealth is departing from 31 of the 34 marketplace exchanges in 2017. Obamacare only accounts for a small single-digit percentage of annual revenue for UnitedHealth, but leaving the exchanges should have a positive impact on its margins. Of course, it'll also leave hundreds of thousands of people on the hunt for a new health plan in 2017.

Humana is following a similar path. The national insurer recently announced that it would be reducing its individual coverage from 19 states to just 11, at most, in 2017. But this superficial figure doesn't tell the real story. In terms of counties, Humana is scaling back from offering coverage in 1,351 counties in 2015 to just 156 in 2017. That's a nearly 90% decline, and it's all on account of Humana dealing with excessive losses tied to Obamacare.

Just last week Aetna also went on the offensive following word that U.S. regulators plan to fight its attempted takeover of Humana. Originally, Aetna planned to expand its Obamacare offerings. That was assuming its merger with Humana went through, and the new entity took advantage of substantial cost synergies. With that merger possibly not happening, Aetna's new stance is to hold off on expanding, or potentially even cut its offerings.

The end result is this: competition is decreasing, which is bad news for the consumer, and insurers are losing money and needing to hike premiums in order to offer a sustainable product over the long-term.

Most states are still negotiating with the initial rate requests for 2017 in the hope of pushing them lower and making healthcare insurance more affordable. However, if I were a betting man, I'd suggest there's a better than 50-50 shot that we're going to witness Obamacare premium inflation top 10 percent as an average across the country in 2017.

Illinois Obamacare raises premiums just before it fails...

Obamacare premiums will increase by 23% to 48%. Thing is that most of those purchasing plans in Illinois are receiving a tax credit…well…those tax credits are going away as well. Hey…did you think Obamacare was a system developed to work?

Illinois' Obamacare plans seek big 2017 premium hikes

By Lisa Schencker

Chicago Tribune

August 2, 2016

Insurers want to crank up the cost of health insurance premiums by as much as 45 percent for Illinois residents who buy coverage through the Affordable Care Act's marketplace.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, the most popular insurer on the state's Obamacare exchange, is proposing increases ranging from 23 percent to 45 percent in premiums for its individual health-care plans, according to proposed 2017 premiums that were made public Monday. The insurer blamed the sought-after hikes mainly on changes in the costs of medical services.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois said in a statement that the proposed rates are in line with those in many markets across the country, and the proposed increases don't tell the whole story.

"No final decisions have been made regarding our 2017 offerings," according to the statement. "While some carriers have chosen to exit the market, we are working toward continuing to provide health insurance options for consumers in Illinois. However, that must be done in a sustainable way."

Coventry Health Care of Illinois proposed rate increases as high as 21 percent.

The Illinois Department of Insurance has until Aug. 23 to review the proposed rates and potentially try to negotiate them down. Final rates can be lower than the ones first proposed by insurers, and the proposed increases don't reflect what consumers will actually pay, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was quick to caution Monday.

Last year, average monthly premiums for consumers with HealthCare.gov coverage increased by $4, to $106 a month "despite headlines suggesting double-digit increases," HHS spokesman Jonathan Gold said Monday in a statement. About 75 percent of Illinois residents who buy plans on the exchange qualify for federal tax credits that partially offset the costs of their premiums.

"Consumers in Illinois will continue to have affordable coverage options in 2017," Gold said in the statement. "Today's announcement is just the beginning of the rates process, and consumers will have the final word when they vote with their feet during Open Enrollment."

Kathy Waligora, director of EverThrive Illinois' health reform initiative, said she also expects many of the rates to be lower than the proposed ones released Monday.

"We don't put too much stock in the numbers as they stand right now because we know the [Department of Insurance] is really negotiating the rates up until the last deadline," she said.

Ultimately it will be insurers setting the rates that will take effect Jan. 1. Illinois, unlike a number of other states, doesn't have the power to reject the proposed rates outright, said Dena Mendelsohn, a staff attorney at Consumers Union, the advocacy and policy division of Consumer Reports.

Regulators in some states, such as California, have been very successful negotiating with insurers to push down proposed rates in the past, she said. That hasn't been the case everywhere.

"It doesn't appear to me like the Illinois rate regulator is rigorously reviewing these rate proposals and advocating for consumers," Mendelsohn said.

Consumer advocates have also complained that Illinois takes too long to publicly release its rates, giving advocates less time to review plans and fight proposed increases. Insurers had to submit their rate plans for Illinois in April, though they were just released publicly Monday as required by the federal government.

Other states make the rate plan proposals public when they are filed, and before Monday, more than half of the states had disclosed just how much higher Obamacare premiums could be. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, for example, proposed an average increase of 53.7 percent.

The increases aren't a surprise as many insurers have been losing money in the marketplace, said Katherine Hempstead, a senior adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Hempstead said Illinois regulators tend to be realistic about just how low proposed rates can go.

"I don't think the Insurance Department wants to push the carriers off a cliff and tell them they can't raise their rates and then they're upside down actuarially," Hempstead said. "You can't sustain a situation where most carriers lose money."

She noted, however, that recent news of insurer Cigna's plans to start selling marketplace plans in the Chicago area is likely good news for consumers. The additional competition could help hold down prices.

It's at least one bright spot for Illinois residents on the exchange, who have been battered by other developments.

Insurer Land of Lincoln Health stunned 49,000 enrollees with its announcement this summer that it would shut down Oct. 1, after sustaining heavy financial losses. And last year, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois decided to discontinue its broadest PPO plan on the exchange after losing money.

lschencker@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @lschencker

Copyright © 2016, Chicago Tribune

Obamacare fails in 2017...Oh yes it does!

Obamacare was designed to fail…you do not believe me? It was designed by a failed congress run by failed Democratic Politians, It was paid for by a failed budget process (remember when Harry Reid Senator D Nevada would not let a budget come to the floor?), it was then deemed to be a tax instituted by the Supreme Court (Hey… I thought congress develops taxes). It’s gonna be bad!

A healthy debate: was Obamacare designed to fail?

Updated: FEBRUARY 9, 2016 — 11:36 AM EST

Philadelphia Inquirer Daily News

Point: Obamacare’s failures could be a design to promote single-payer

By Howard J. Peterson

Democratic socialist progressives, hard to know what term to use these days, unabashedly embrace single payer healthcare for the United States.  The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed by Congress with no Republican votes in 2010.  It didn’t achieve single payer.  However, an examination of how Obamacare has evolved might lead to the conclusion that it was designed to fail as a way to, ultimately, force a single payer system.

The only material success of Obamacare has been the expansion of Medicaid.  14M new people have been added to the Medicaid roles in states that adopted Medicaid expansion.  According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the number of uninsured citizens as of June 2015 has only declined by 10 million. So, if you add the growth of the population since 2014 (6M) to the decline in uninsured (10M) (6+10=16) and then subtract the 14M new Medicaid enrollees, the result is that only 2M people who were previously uninsured have gotten insurance through the federal and state exchanges. 

The exchanges have produced no material benefit.  Therefore, one might conclude that these exchanges were simply established to destroy commercial insurance markets. The exchanges have required minimum benefits some of which make little sense (64 year-old women being required to carry OB coverage), dramatically increased co-payments and deductibles, increased overall insurance plans rates rather than reduce them by the promised $2,500, escalated taxes/penalties for not participating and driven insurance companies out of the exchanges given their mounting losses and severed the ability for many people to see your own doctor. 

So, if one were a conspiracy theorist it would go something like this: the Democrats knew there would be growth in Medicare driven by the aging population. Obamacare focused on the expansion of Medicaid with a plan to increase dependency on federal funding.  The exchanges only purpose was the destruction of the commercial insurance market.  Given these factors and the growing national debt due to Obamacare and the fact that 32M U.S. citizens still remain uninsured a compelling case could be made to move to a single payer system as the only and obvious solution.  Great, the VA for everybody.

Democratic socialist progressives, I believe, would applaud the shift of the entire healthcare sector (17% of our economy) to federal government control.  Combine that with a carbon tax and existing social programs and this positions the federal government to define pretty much all of how we live our lives. 

Contrary to this direction, we have enough money currently within healthcare to pay for the clinical needs of our entire population.  The real problem is not cost; its utilization.  The United States provides most healthcare services at two times the rate of other countries (MRIs, orthopedic implants, tonsillectomies).  We do this because of the flawed incentives of our payment system.  We could fix this by changing payment incentives and preserving a commercial insurance market.   But those who crafted Obamacare may be more interested in controlling the citizens than solving the problem.

2017 Obamacare Closes! Premiums rise...Americans cannot afford!

Big PROBLEM looming in 2017! Premiums will skyrocket because the Federal Government will stop insuring Obama Exchanges from losses. Why 2017???? Because Obama, and his henchman will be out of office, and start pointing fingers at the next administration. Here is just one thought….With the huge deficit Obama has run up the next president will be unable to borrow. That means we are all in for less Government spending on everything. Another thought….start firing bureaucrat!  

Most Obamacare insurers lost money

By PAIGE WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM (@PW_CUNNINGHAM) • 7/20/16 5:51 PM

Washington Examiner

A majority of health insurers lost money during the first year of the Obamacare marketplaces, a new study finds.

Two-thirds of the insurers failed to turn any profits from plans they sold to individuals in 2014, although a majority of those insurers didn't profit in the prior year, either, according to a report from the Commonwealth Fund. One-third of the insurers did succeed in turning a profit.

When researchers analyzed data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on insurers' profits, they found that companies underestimated their spending on the new enrollees by 2 percent. Estimating how much the new consumers would cost was a difficult challenge for insurers, because they had to make all kinds of assumptions about how sick or healthy the new customer base would be.

A federal reinsurance program designed to smooth insurer losses helped ease the way for some insurers in the first few years of the Affordable Care Act's exchanges, the authors noted.

"One insurer can have a very different experience than another, so to draw accurate conclusions about how insurance companies are faring in the ACA marketplaces it's important to look at their experiences comprehensively," said Mark Hall, the study's lead author and a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Law.

"When we do that it is clear that estimating exactly how much these new enrollees would cost them was a challenge but the reinsurance program protected them from large losses on enrollees with high medical costs," he said.

But that reinsurance program ends next year, leading insurers to recently propose bigger premium increases than during the first few years of the exchanges. One major insurer, UnitedHealthcare, is withdrawing from the exchanges next year, citing too-big losses.

Obamacare will collapes in 2017! You heard it hear first!

In 2017 Obamacare will collapse! You heard it here first! The below article all but says so! Americans that have been forced to purchase Obamacare will simply stand-up, and tell the bureaucrat to stick-it!

Get Ready for Huge Obamacare Premium Hikes in 2017

By Eric Pianin    April 21, 2016

Amid rising drug and health care costs and roiling market dynamics, the spokesperson for the nation’s health insurers is predicting substantial increases next year in Obamacare premiums and related costs.

Without venturing a specific percentage increase, Marilyn Tavenner, the president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), said in an interview with Morning Consult that the culmination of market shifts and rising health care costs will force stark increases in health insurance rates in the coming year.

 “I’ve been asked, what are the premiums going to look like?” she said. “I don’t know because it also varies by state, market, even within markets. But I think the overall trend is going to be higher than we saw previous years. That’s my big prediction.”

If Tavenner is right, Obamacare will jump dramatically—last year’s premium for the popular silver-level plan surged 11 percent on average. Although Tavenner didn’t mention deductibles, in 2016, some states saw jumps of 76 percent, while the average deductible for a 27-year-old male on a silver plan was 8 percent.

The warning to consumers from Tavenner, the former administration official who headed the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and oversaw the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov, the Obamacare website, comes at a time of growing uncertainty about the evolving makeup of the Obamacare health insurance market. With many insurers struggling to find profitability in the program, the collapse of nearly half of the 23 Obamacare insurance co-ops and this week’s announcement that giant UnitedHealth Group intends to pull out of most Obamacare markets across the country, anticipating future premiums and copayments is largely risky guesswork.

Premiums for the current 2016 season rose on average by 8 percent over the previous year, with 12.7 million Americans enrolling for coverage and government subsidies, according to CMS. Federal officials stress that the average rate doesn’t tell the whole story, and that in many cases after consumers shop around for the best price and government subsidies are applied, the actual premium increase is lower.

The Department of Health and Human Services did a study looking at what consumers were estimated to pay based on initial filings compared to what they actually paid. The study found that last year, the average cost of Obamacare marketplace coverage for people receiving tax credits went from $102 a month to $106 per month, a 4 percent change -- despite warning from some of double-digit hikes.

Tavenner’s prediction may well be an opening gambit in the negotiations between the industry and insurance regulators about the 2017 premiums. As Morning Consult noted, many insurers have begun submitting opening bids on raising their premium rates and copayments, which will then be reviewed by the government and finalized this fall.

With a major presidential and congressional election looming this fall, the administration is doing all that it can to tamp down fears of major hikes next year in Obamacare insurance premiums and related out-of-pocket costs. Benjamin Wakana, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson, said on Thursday that changes in health care insurance rates are “not a reliable indicator” of what typical consumers on average will pay. “Marketplace consumers would do well to put little stock in those initial numbers,” he said in an email. 

But Tavenner outlined several factors that she could put considerable pressure on premium prices next year. Those include:

·        A general rise in the nation’s health care tab. Overall, U.S. health care spending grew by 5.3 percent in 2014 – reaching an historic level of $3 trillion, after years of relative cost stability. Medical costs rise from year to year and will certainly affect the next round of premium hikes.

·        Soaring prescription drug prices. Insurers as well as government health care programs have been struggling to keep pace with rising drug prices, especially newer specialty drugs to treat the Hepatitis-C virus and cancer. Pfizer Inc., Amgen Inc., Allergan PLC and other companies have raised U.S. prices for scores of branded drugs since late December, with many of the increases between 9 percent and 10 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal .

·        The combination of market forces and limitations imposed by the Affordable Care Act will put enormous pressure on insurers to up their premiums. Under the law, there is a cap on insurers’ profits, companies are obliged to insure anyone regardless of their general health or pre-existing conditions, and the insurance plans must be structured in a certain way that often lead to losses.

·        Finally, two of three federal “risk mitigation” programs created under Obamacare are due to expire in 2017. Those programs were set up to protect insurers from huge, unexpected losses from providing health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges. UnitedHealth and other major insurers have found it difficult to accurately anticipate their costs in providing coverage to sicker or older Americans, and set premiums that were inadequate to cover their risks. Without those programs to fall back on, many companies likely will seek to jack up their premiums.

“It’s kind of a myriad of factors,” Tavenner said in predicting rising premium costs. “It’s not one factor.”

Clare Krusing, director of communications for AHIP, said in an interview on Thursday that health insurance companies “are working through” these factors right now in setting rates for the coming year and deciding whether to participate.

“Plans are just beginning to file their rates, and it’s a long process with state and federal regulators, until those are approved,” she added. “Certainly plans are going to evaluate market conditions and regulatory approvals, and that will all impact their participation overall” in Obamacare.

Obamacare premiums are on the rise, and yes NYC, OR, and VT are hardest hit

Obamacare premiums are on the rise, and yes NYC, OR, and VT are hardest hit! Oh…does it matter Obamacare is going broke. Who could have imagined?....A business system set-up my a bunch of brain dead Government Employees is doomed before it could start day one!  

Double-digit ObamaCare premium hikes projected in 2017

Published June 15, 2016 

FoxNews.com's Joseph Weber and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Americans in markets across the country could be looking at double-digit premium hikes under ObamaCare next year, according to a new study that's already fueling election-year finger-pointing. 

The Kaiser Family Foundation report found premiums for popular low-cost plans under the health care law are projected to increase an average 11 percent in 2017. 

Among the sharpest projected increases are: 26 percent in Portland, Ore.; 21 percent in the District of Columbia; and 16 percent in New York City.  

The study focused on the two least-expensive -- and very popular -- "silver" policies. It specifically examined the impact of rising premiums on those whose income exceeds the limit to get government subsidies to defray the cost of mandatory insurance. 

The income cutoff for those tax credits is $47,520 for an individual and $97,200 for a family of four. 

"Several factors will influence how premiums will change in 2017, and there is reason to believe that increases will be higher than in recent years," the report said. 

The findings were based on 14 metro areas across the country.

The Portland, New York and D.C. increases were for ObamaCare’s lowest-cost Silver Premium plan. Costs are projected to decrease in just two metro areas -- Providence, R.I. (13 percent) and Indianapolis (4 percent).

The full picture on 2017 premiums will emerge later this summer as the presidential and congressional elections head into the home stretch. The next ObamaCare signup starts a week before Election Day.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton wants to build on President Obama’s signature health law while Republican nominee Donald Trump wants to repeal and replace it.

Washington Republicans were quick to point out the projected increases and try to tie them to Democrats seeking re-election in November.

“This latest round of double-digit premium increases for consumers is just further evidence that ObamaCare has failed to make health care affordable for Americans,” Bob Salera, a National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman, said Wednesday.

“House Democrats’ continued support for ObamaCare is a slap in the face to the families who are facing rising costs as a direct result of President Obama’s failed health care law, and voters will hold them accountable in November.”

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokeswoman Meredith Kelly called the NRCC statement “a desperate attempt to distract from what this election will really be about: Donald Trump.”

The administration remains steadfast that proposed rates are not  what consumers ultimately will pay, citing an April 12 Department of Health and Human Services report and arguing that the average premium in 2016 for people with tax credits increased just $4, from $102 to $106 a month, despite headlines suggesting double-digit hikes.

“And consumers will benefit from shopping and tax credits again this year,” HHS spokesman Benjamin Wakana told FoxNews.com. "This is just the beginning of the rates process ... proposed rates aren’t what most consumers actually pay."

Wakana also argued “the vast majority” of consumers qualify for tax credits that reduce the cost of coverage below the “sticker price.”

The Kaiser analysis examined the impact before subsidies are calculated, however, and found the changes in the second least-expensive plan were almost identical -- with the same three metro areas having similar projected increases and just Providence and Indianapolis showing projected decreases.

Kaiser said the two plans are significant because they are the most common choices in the marketplaces and the second-lowest is the benchmark used for subsidies. 

The cheaper plans typically have higher deductibles, with overall costs ranging from market to market. The study found the monthly premium for a 40-year-old nonsmoker in 2017 in the least-expensive Silver plan will range from $192 in Albuquerque, N.M., to $482 in Burlington, Vt.

Final rates may change if regulators push back on the requests from insurers. 

Most workers and their families are covered by employers, but about 12 million people get private coverage through ObamaCare insurance markets. Nearly seven in 10 pick the mid-tier silver plans. 

About 2 million marketplace customers, though, make too much to qualify for the subsidies. And an estimated 3 million to 5 million who buy their policies outside of markets such as ObamaCare do not receive financial assistance.

For both the subsidized and the unsubsidized, willingness to switch plans may be crucial in keeping premiums more manageable next year.

“If they stay in their same plan they may see a higher premium increase,” said Cynthia Cox, the analysis’ lead author.

The premium increases follow major insurers reporting significant losses, enrollment lower than hoped for, new customers being sicker than expected and other problems. 

Medicare and Medicaid, federal agencies that oversees ObamaCare, said recently that the health insurance markets are still in an early trial-and-error stage which could go on for another couple of years, or well into the next president’s term.