November 11, 2013
That’s the question that readers of Lori Gottlieb’s column must be asking. Ms. Gottlieb claims that her Blue Cross policy was cancelled and that now she would have to pay an additional $5,400 a year for insurance that complied with the Affordable Care Act. Really?
Unless the Kaiser Family Foundation got its numbers badly messed up, Ms. Gottlieb is just making stuff up. Its website shows that a silver plan, which is mid-grade, not lowest cost, would cost a person living in Los Angeles with one kid $5,244 a year. That is less than $5,400 addition to her health care costs claimed in the piece. Let’s assume that Blue Cross in California does not give away insurance to people who are 46, even if they are in excellent health. If Blue Cross charges $250 a month for insurance for a healthy 46 year-old with one kid then Ms. Gottlieb is currently paying $3,000 a year for insurance.
That means that Obamacare is raising Ms. Gottlieb’s insurance costs by just over $2,200 a year or less than half of the amount claimed in her piece. It would be nice if the NYT would have fact checkers examine the claims made in its op-eds instead of just giving them a license to make facts up to advance their argument.
Note: cost of insurance numbers under Obamacare corrected. Thanks to Robert Salzberg.
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