Insurers Jack Rates by 20 Percent

Health-care reform hasn’t convinced insurers to behave nicely; in fact, it may have done just the opposite: On Monday, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a study revealing that people who buy their own insurance have recently faced rate increases averaging 20 percent. On Tuesday, President Obama will meet with insurance executives to warn them against such rate hikes—and against blaming such hikes on health-care reform. “Our message to them is to work with this law, not against it; don’t try and take advantage of it or we will work with state authorities and gather the authority we have to stop rate gouging,” David Axelrod tells The New York Times. “Our concern is that they not try and, under the cover of the act, get in under the wire here on rate increases.”