The Texas Obamacare ruling's biggest impact could be on insurance costs

A Texas judge’s ruling late Friday that the provision of the Affordable Care Act requiring everyone be insured is unconstitutional and therefore the law doesn’t stand will almost certainly not stand on appeal, as most legal scholars agree.

So while the law isn’t gone, the ruling adds more uncertainty in the minds of many individuals. This isn’t good for insurance costs, no matter what your beliefs are about the program, also known as Obamacare.

As a former insurance company CEO, I question whether this is enough to drive insurers away from the individual market. If premiums cover costs for a sufficient number of customers, the profit potential will keep it going. And I’ll bet that very little change will actually occur since the ACA’s key provisions are so attractive to so many.

However, the damage from continuing assaults on Obamacare is serious. It is bad enough that incremental challenges to its individual insurance exchanges have already pushed millions away from the pool. But a crazy unintended result of the federal government welching on what it owed insurers in the first three years under the law to help stabilize the new market actually cost it more as premiums skyrocketed.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-texas-obamacare-rulings-biggest-impact-could-be-on-insurance-costs-2018-12-16