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"Here's the money quote: "Medical costs associated with caring for the new individual market enrollees were, on average, 19 percent higher than employer-based group members in 2014 and 22 percent higher in 2015."
The Blues are implying that these costs are higher than they expected, but the report actually tells a very different story: It demonstrates exactly why the Affordable Care Act was a necessity.
The reason that new enrollees tend to be sicker than the previous pool of patients in the individual market, and consequently are using more services and costing insurers more, is that sick people were systematically excluded from the individual insurance market prior to 2014. The mechanism was exclusions for pre-existing conditions, which were outlawed by the ACA."
http://www.latimes.com/business/hilt...htmlstory.html