Health insurance premiums for people buying coverage on their own grew an average of 10 percent or more a year during the three years before the Affordable Care Act was enacted, according to a new Commonwealth Fund report. The analysis, by Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, uses information collected by the National Opinion Research Center to look at premium trends for individual plans nationally and in 22 states for which data are available—offering the first snapshot of premium growth in the individual insurance market before the health reform law took effect.
"This report provides a baseline for evaluating the effects of the ACA on premium costs and reminds us that before the law, many families buying coverage on their own saw their premiums skyrocket even when their plans didn't adequately cover the care they needed," said Commonwealth Fund President David Blumenthal, M.D.