House Republicans were fishing around today for anything negative to about Obamacare. They thought bringing the executives of the insurance companies to Capitol Hill to testify about the law would be a great way confirm their already debunked talking points about Obamacare. Their plan however backfired, as one executive after the next shut down their crazy assumption.
One of the talking points floating around now is that Obamacare policy prices would explode in 2015. House Republicans were trying to get the executives to admit that this was true, that 2015 would be the year Obamacare dies, but they failed tremendously.
Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA), chair of the subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that hosted the hearing, opened the questioning with what seemed like a laundry list of potential problem spots for the health care law.
Are people going to paying higher premiums in 2015?
“I can’t say for certain,” one of the executives replied. “I don’t have the exact numbers yet,” another said.
Do you know if your enrollees are paying more for insurance now under Obamacare? Do you know how many had their previous health plan canceled?
“We currently do not have that data,” one of the witnesses said.
A little while later, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), one of the more outspoken Obamacare critics in Congress, got audibly flustered as she continued to press insurers to reveal their business plans in front of their competitors, pressing the witnesses to give some indication of what Obamacare’s 2015 premiums will be.
“At this point, we can’t offer any guidance on where they’re going to fall,” Paul Wingle, a top executive at Aetna, told Blackburn.
“At this juncture, we do not have that information,” another witness said.
“A lot of uncertainty floating around up there,” Blackburn quipped. She then implored the witnesses to offer anything — even some kind of preliminary guess that might have been given to their top officials — of what was going to happen with the next year’s premiums.
“Have any of you conducted any interim analysis of what your organization’s premiums are going to look like?” she said. She asked for a show of hands. No witnesses volunteered.
“You have done no internal analysis on what the trend line is for these premiums? None?” Blackburn said, clearly exasperated. “It is baffling that we could have some of our nation’s largest insurers, and you all don’t have any internal analysis of what these rates are going to be.
