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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. |