[jerrytsai]

I'm going to take your post at face value. But I once was an Aetna employee several years ago, with very similar personal and insurance plan attributes as those listed in your first four bullets, but my premium was quite a bit more expensive than yours. I'm a little incredulous at how low your premium is.

Aetna is not in the business of losing money on the policies it issues. I can only think that either (1) you have failed to mention attributes of your health plan that are less than ideal (e.g., coverage cap of $25,000, but you claim that you have no coverage limit(?)), (2) that you have been placed in a very low risk pool, or (3) that you have a significant subsidy that allows to you to purchase a plan that would seem to be actuarially unsound for a for-profit company like Aetna.

[dangrossman]

Dunno what I can tell you. I got the plan through eHealthInsurance.com a few years ago. It said there's no annual limit, and on the "Coverage & Benefits" page at member.aetna.com, there's no mention of any dollar limits other than the deductible and an "Annual Durable Medical Equipment Maximum". I'm not getting any subsidies; I make too much for that.

http://i.imgur.com/yD9OgHQ.png

It wasn't the only sub-$100 plan I could choose from on that site either IIRC. I went with Aetna because I was living in Blue Bell at the time, and Aetna HQ was practically in my back yard, half a mile down the street.

Edit: Found the paperwork for the thing. Everything as I said, but a $5M lifetime coverage limit.

[stephenhuey]

When I was a self-employed single male for a couple of years in my late 20s, I also qualified for a plan well under $100 per month. Not sure what it would be if I didn't receive coverage from my employer, but I imagine I'm still in a low-risk pool. However, I'd think your plan would at least have a cap. I think I figured out "Annual Durable Medical Equipment Maximum" but it's funny that Google only has 3 results mentioning that phrase.

[jerrytsai]

DavidAdams has a good explanation of why the Obamacare premiums will be higher than the one you are currently paying.

One thing that Obamacare is supposed to do, and it seems that it has done this in general, is make sure that the insurance plan you purchase (via monthly premiums) is worthwhile. Health insurance is cognitively difficult to evaluate, and before the Affordable Care Act many people purchased plans that offered rather poor coverage because these plans had very low premiums. (Many people are either unable or unwilling to learn the details of their health plan, or if they know the details don't mind gambling, so these types of "you think you have insurance, until you have a calamity" plans flourished.)

The ACA is supposed to prevent people from buying these "lemons" by outlawing these plans. So some plans offered by insurers were supposed to be discontinued, i.e., you couldn't stay on them, but others were "grandfathered", i.e., you could stay on them because they met the minimum qualifications set.

Obama got into a lot of trouble because he said (paraphrasing) that if you liked your health plan, you could keep it, which was false. So politically he had to backtrack and now, for the next two years, whether a plan meets the ACA standards is irrelevant, you can keep your plan regardless of how lousy it may or may not be.

It sounds, as DavidAdams speculates, that you are in a very low-risk pool, which is certainly possible. You are on the right side of 30 and may have a great medical history, which puts you in "very low risk" pool, in which case the premium you're being charged could make actuarial sense for the insurer. However, what you have not yet experienced is the flip side of age bracketing and the inevitable detriments to your health that eventually will occur. Once you turn 30, you will be in a new bracket, and your premium will go up. Percentage-wise, it will be considerable, but since you're starting from such a low base it will be modest in an absolute sense. However, as the years accumulate, assuming your plan has been grandfathered, you will likely notice that these premium increases will start accumulating to the point where you may feel the insurer is gouging you.

That is, unless the ACA remains the law of the land, in which you can just sign up for one of the Obamacare plans to join a better risk pool than the one the insurer has placed you in.

So from a game-theoretical perspective, assuming your plan is grandfathered, you should stay on it as long as you can, until the premium increases to the point to where switching to an Obamacare plan makes financial sense. This assumes that your insurer has no grounds for rescission (i.e., to retroactively rescind its coverage of your health care costs because you misled them about your medical history at enrollment). If there are grounds, then the "guaranteed issue" aspect of Obamacare plans becomes attractive.