CBO: Obamacare Will Force Families to Buy Insurance Costing at Least $12,000/Year

If Congress passes the Senate health-care plan, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, American families will be required by federal law to buy a federally approved health insurance plan that will cost a minimum of $12,000 per year--and, on average, will cost $15,000 per year -- whether their employer or the government helps them with the premium or not. ...

Families earning more than $88,200 a year (or whatever 400 percent of the poverty level equals in any given year) would be entirely on their own. Under the Senate bill, employers would not be required to purchase health insurance for their workers, and if they decided not to do so, the maximum penalty they would have to pay would be $750 per year for each worker they did not insure who subsequently received a federal subsidy to buy insurance. The $750 penalty on employers who decided not to insure their workers would be far less than they would pay in premiums for the $12,000 minimum required plan.

According to the CBO analysis, the insurance plans the Senate bill would require families to purchase would cost an average of $15,200 per year in 2016.  “Average premiums among all types of plans in 2016 would be about $5,800 for single policies and about $15,200 for family policies,” CBO Director Douglas W. Elmendorf wrote in a letter to Sen. Olympa Snowe (R-Maine).

But even the bare-bones, minimum coverage required by the individual mandate in the bill--known as the “Bronze” level insurance plans--would cost families an estimated $12,000 to $12,500 a year, Elmendorf told Snowe.