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When providers have a captive audience (individual mandate), and there is a run on demand (cost shifting, subsidized care, and pre-existing coverage) coupled with expensive requirements and beaurocracy (coverage requirements) you can expect prices to rise. Ironically, there are laws against price gouging.

Who knows I'd ahca will be the fix that makes everyone happy- I doubt any plan can do that. But if all it does is restore some measure of natural market forces to the healthcare system, prices will at minimum, stabilize. If all we ever did was go back to the old system, costs would stabilize.

If I'm reading you right, you are the only liberal here except for Bamasjw that still supports the aca.

Costs have not been stable in decades. You are perpetuating the same myth as other people. This is why your arguments about just repealing the ACA to create a stable and more cost efficient market fall apart.

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Since 1999, health insurance premiums for families rose 131%, the report found, far more than the general rate of inflation, which increased 28% over the same period. Overall, health care in the United States is expected to cost $2.6 trillion this year, or 17% of the nation’s economy, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

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The annual survey of more than 2,000 companies also found that 40% of small-business employees enrolled in individual health plans pay annual deductibles of $1,000 or more. That’s almost twice the number who paid that much in 2007.

For context both pieces were written in 2009. Before the ACA passed.

This is an ongoing trend. It exists for a complex set of reasons and just allowing insurers to charge sick, old people, and woman more money is not going to reverse the trend. It can, and will as the CBO points out, shift the winners and losers, but the trends are not going away. The inputs that produce the insurance premiums continue to go up and until changes are made that drastically change that, the trend will continue.

This post was edited on 5/26/17 at 5:42 pm