Obamacare premiums, after jumping 25% in each of the last two years in a row, are set to have absolutely massive jumps in premiums next year.

Three states have announced preliminary 2019 premium-rate requests for Obamacare individual-market policies, and the numbers don’t look good.

In Virginia, the first state out of the gate, insurers requested hikes as high as 64.3 percent. Across all insurers, and weighted for current enrollment, the average increase is likely to be “only” 13.4 percent, according to calculations from health care analyst Charles Gaba.

In Vermont, one of its marketplace insurers requested an average 7.5 percent increase, and the other a 10.9 percent average annual rate increase.

In Maryland, insurers have also proposed double-digit increases. There, price hikes average 30 percent, with one plan penciling in an astonishing 91.4 percent jump.

The Obamacare co-ops are largely history, and now the idea of unsubsidized Obamacare is fading as a possibility.
This has led to Dems and Repubs blaming each other.

“Thus far, Democrats have been on the defensive about premium increases,” said Cynthia Cox, a health insurance expert with the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Now they’re starting to play offense, and from our polling we’ve seen that a lot of the public now feels that the Trump administration and Congress are responsible for any problems with the [Affordable Care Act] going forward, so it may be that the politics of premium increases has changed.”

Two things are true: 1) Republicans are partly responsible, and 2) Republicans have no idea what to replace Obamacare with.

So what are the Democrats' idea? How about Obamacare + a public option and more subsidies? Or Public Option on Steroids?
Or Medicare For More?

If these all sound like incremental bandaids, that's because they are.
This is a party that firmly believes that “radical centrism” is a thing.
One thing is for certain: health care will become a bigger and bigger issue.