It’s nice to get a 20% discount on anything these days.
It’s even better to get a 20% discount on a high-ticket item like health insurance premiums.
Across the state, hundreds of thousands of Colorado families who buy their own health insurance will save an average of 20.2% on their premiums this coming year, with much greater savings in rural communities that suffer from the highest health care costs.
Let me tell you how my administration and lawmakers did it, and what’s next for our agenda to save people money on health care.
The Affordable Care Act allowed states to expand Medicaid and set up health care exchanges where insurance companies could offer more affordable plans. Colorado took the initiative, expanded Medicaid, and set up a health care exchange called Connect for Health Colorado. As a result, the uninsured rate in our state fell from 13% to 6.5%.
But health care costs remained high, especially in rural areas where fewer choices forced hardworking Colorado families to shoulder some of the highest health premiums in the nation.
So when Coloradans made me their governor, I got to work on an innovative policy called reinsurance that passed with the support of legislators on both sides of the aisle.
Reinsurance allows insurance companies to offset their most costly claims, which adds stability to the health care marketplace. And when insurance companies have more certainty that they can offset costly claims, your premiums go down.
As a result of this policy, the typical family of four who gets their health care from the exchange will save $6,193 per year on average, with savings as high as $10,302 per year in some areas of the state that have been the hardest-hit by high health care costs.
This is an absolute game-changer for Coloradans who buy their own health insurance — small business owners who can’t afford to provide coverage for their employees, self-employed folks, people who retire a few years before Medicare kicks in, and those employed in the gig economy.
Open enrollment started on Friday, Nov. 1 and lasts through the end of the year. If you are someone who doesn’t get health care through your employer or the government, visit ConnectForHealthCO.com and see how much you can save — especially if you are already enrolled in a plan offered on the exchange.
And if you’ve been going without health insurance because you couldn’t afford it, check out these new rates to see if you can fit it into your budget.
This is also good news if you do have employer-sponsored coverage. When premiums on the health exchange go down, more people can afford to purchase coverage, and when there are fewer uninsured folks drawing from the system and shifting costs onto others, then everyone’s costs go down.
Lower premiums on the state’s health exchange will also inject more competition into the insurance market, which will put pressure on insurance companies to offer better rates on employer-based health coverage.
Speaking of injecting competition into the insurance market, I’m also hard at work developing a public option to reduce costs even further.
Because when you have more options to choose from when it comes to health plans, insurance companies have to compete for your business, which means you’re likely to get a better rate.
And this public option will be a crucial lifeline especially to rural communities where there may be only one or two insurance providers, leading to higher prices.
That’s just a small sample of the work we’re doing to reduce health care costs.
We also enacted a landmark hospital transparency bill to get hospital costs under control, and legislation to tackle surprise out-of-network billing. We passed a plan to import cheaper prescription drugs safely from Canada to save people money, and we’re working with the federal government to implement the policy. And we did it all with bipartisan support.
There’s lots more work ahead, but in the meantime, let’s take advantage of these significant savings and celebrate something we see about as often as a blue moon: health costs actually going down.
Jared Polis is the governor of Colorado.
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