New York recently announced that individual plans under Obamacare will save it’s citizens 50%.  This is huge!  Obamacare will cut the premium costs of 6% of America in half!

The rest of us likely won’t be quite as fortunate.  Most states still don’t know how much, if anything, they will save.  New York had the highest premium costs for individual insurance in the country.  This is because of a law that requires insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions.  Without a mandate for its citizens to carry health insurance, as more people with preexisting conditions signed up, the costs of insurance for everyone went up.  This caused healthy people to drop their insurance which caused the costs for those with the preexisting conditions to go up. Obamacare both demands preexisting conditions be covered and that individuals carry insurance under penalty of law.  Thus the very large savings for New York which only had half the formula to save money.

The most important takeaway from this is that what’s happening in New York highlights exactly what Obamacare proponents have argued would happen.  A larger pool that can’t exclude anyone leads to drastically lower premiums for the individual.  In my analogy where Obamacare is a bag of poo left on the doorstep but what we had before was a flaming bag of poo, what’s happening in New York is what put out the fire.