Jul 26 2013
The Government Accountability Office report, which is based on prices reported by insurers, shows that consumers face a wide range of premium prices, deductibles and annual exposure to out-of-pocket costs.
The Washington Post's Wonkblog: Our Data On Health Premiums Has Been Pretty Bad. Not Anymore.
On Monday, the Government Accountability Office sent back a thick stack of insurance data, broken down by state, explaining the cost of health insurance. Analysts there used data from HealthCare.Gov, a new site created under the Affordable Care Act where insurers post their offerings and how much they cost. The database, the GAO analysts admit, isn't perfect. About 20 percent of insurers don't post their plan data, which means we're missing about one-fifth of the marketplace. There's no enrollment data, which means some of the options listed may not have any subscribers. Still, this is probably the best data set we have on insurance premiums so far (Kliff, 7/24).
Kaiser Health News: Capsules: Current Insurance Costs For Individual Policies Vary Widely
Now, the Government Accountability Office is weighing in with its own analysis of how much it costs now for policies offered in each of the 50 states. The report released Wednesday is based on prices reported by insurers to a government database and shows that consumers face a wide range of premium prices, deductibles and annual exposure to out-of-pocket costs, often depending on their age, health history, family size and where they live (Appleby, 7/24).
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 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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