The Coming Obamacare Shock for 170 Million Americans

[cusman]

Obamacare will cost you the higher of

$95/month per adult and something less than that per child
OR
1% of your yearly gross income

If you are an uninsured healthy individual, this is going to suck for you. In my case, since I want multi-state coverage, it is going to cost $700 / month for my family of 4. The lowest cost I could get was around $550 / month but that didn't cover anything outside of my home state and I do travel.

...
If you are low income with that scale determined by number of family members but generally
One benefit/cost of Obamacare is that your health insurance premium cost is based on your income level, and not your health level.

Second benefit of Obamacare is that you are now being sold Insurance as part of a "big" group, so your overall cost is lower. Basically if you were in small company and had small group size and therefore higher premiums, now it should all equalize into a larger group so you would have the lower premium costs like what large companies were used to getting.

The group size thing is all about how a single employer/account gets risk spread between the insured. If you have ten employees and one of them gets cancer, then you become unprofitable on that account immediately even while charging higher premiums (and they would raise the rates at that point in case a 2nd employee gets cancer). However, if you have 4000 employees and 10 of them get cancer at a time, you are probably still profitable even with lower premiums.

Insurance is all about spreading the risk where the healthy essentially pay for the unhealthy. The main issue health insurance companies have with Obamacare isn't the mandating of everyone to get coverage. It is that they are not allowed to deny or charge higher premiums for the coverage based on individual risk factors.

In principal Insurance companies shouldn't care, because once a large enough pool of uninsured (including healthy) get insured, then the risk will be appropriately spread. Their big concern now is the early adopters to Obamacare are people that are probably at risk and actually need insurance while the others choosing to pay the fine over the actual coverage costs are the healthy ones that would spread that risk and make it all financially viable before premium rates (or fines to increase adoption) would have to be increased.