Women ages 55 to 64 hit hardest by increased costs under Obamacare

From the Washington Post:

What Mark Pauly, Scott Harrington, and Adam Leive of the Wharton School have done is to figure out how much non-elderly individuals spent on insurance before the ACA and then compared these figures with what they’ll spend after the ACA.  They did this by using survey data for 2010 through 2012 from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey that show how much people spent on health care, including premiums and out of pocket payments.  By looking at the total spent rather than just on premiums, the data reflect the fact that someone who buys a policy with a low premium can expect to have higher out of pocket costs, and vice versa.  They report their findings in a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

For post-ACA prices, they looked at the premiums for the various levels of coverage (these levels are classified according to various metals: bronze, silver, gold and platinum) and estimated out of pocket payments according to data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. The data were tabulated by age and gender for the bronze and the two lowest price silver plans. 

After crunching the numbers, they found that people who buy the bronze or silver plans on the federal exchanges will spend a moderate amount more  — from $694 to $1,165 a year, or 14 to 24 percent — on premiums and out of pocket expenses than they did before the health reform took effect. 

However, that average figure masks a huge redistribution of the costs to older women from nearly everyone else. 

Total expected premiums and out of pocket expenses rose by 50 percent for women age 55 to 64 — a much larger increase than for any other group — for policies on the federal exchanges relative to prices that individuals who bought individual insurance before health care reform went into effect. 

Women age 55 to 64 will pay from $2,185 to $2,738 more in premiums and out of pocket  expenses under the new health insurance environment than they did pre-ACA.
Premiums for the second-lowest silver policy are 67 percent higher for a 55 to 64-year-old woman than they were pre-ACA. . . .