HealthSourceRI, the state’s taxpayer-financed ObamaCare insurance marketplace start-up, has released the 2014 premiums for plans through its Web site.  Among the challenges of this sort of information is how complicated it is.  One might reasonably wonder whether it’s deliberately set up to have so many variables that nobody short of a policy wonk could decipher whether (maybe… provisionally…) it’s a better deal than what would be available without the government’s involvement.

In part, providing translations is the role that the news media is supposed to fill, and here’s Providence Journal reporter Felice Freyer’s take:

While it’s not possible to make apples-to-apples comparisons, a glance at 2013 prices for individuals’ insurance suggests there will not be “rate shock” in Rhode Island, at least not in the individual market.

For example, currently a Blue Cross plan with a $3,000 deductible costs $400 monthly for a 40-year-old man who did not pass a health screening and $209 for one who did ($277 for a healthy woman). Through HealthSource RI, a Blue Cross plan with a $3,000 deductible will cost $294 for a 40-year-old person –– male or female, healthy or unhealthy. The Affordable Care Act does not allow discrimination based on gender or health status.

That explanation, however, requires two bits of analysis that the average Rhode Islander won’t necessarily perform.

First, Freyer suggests that “rate shock” won’t happen, but according to her own numbers, a healthy middle-aged man will see an increase of 41%.  Does that qualify for “rate shock”?

Currently, a healthy man between 25 and 29 will pay $150.08 per month. Through the exchange, using the same comparison as Freyer, prices will range from $231 for a 25-year-old to $258 for a 29-year-old.  That’s an increase of 54% to 72%.  For the 29-year-old, the annual expense will go up from $1,801 to $3,096.  Will that be a shock to his budget?  What else might he have spent that $1,295 on?

The tax money and/or debt that the federal government will now devote to paying down some of the increase applies at lower income ranges, but the best one can say is that “not everybody will have ‘rate shock.'”  If you’re the sort of person whom actuaries have determined is not likely to use a lot of healthcare services, then you’ll be paying a lot more for the healthcare services that you do use… as well as those that you don’t.

That leads directly to the second bit of analysis that must be unwound from Freyer’s explanation: The word “discrimination” distorts the reality beyond recognition.  In fact, one might say that such language is “anti-science.”

Insurance rates are different for different people not because some healthy, young, male CEO somewhere has decided to stick it to unhealthy older women.  It was a mistake for the United States to allow health insurance to become confused with total healthcare service plans, but with that as the starting point, companies need to find some way to align prices with expenses.

It isn’t “discrimination” — at least in the sense that politicians and journalists typically intend that word — to charge people different amounts of money for using different amounts of services.  That language is every bit as heavy an ideological thumb on the scale as it would be to say, instead, that “the Affordable Care Act does not allow fair pricing for consumers.”

Put plainly, ObamaCare and HealthSourceRI redistribute the money of healthy people to unhealthy people — whose condition may or may not be of their own doing.  They redistribute the money of men to women.  They redistribute the money of the young to the old.  And they do that while siphoning off a healthy stream of public dollars as its own fee for the transaction.

That’s the reality, and Rhode Islanders should have it laid out before them and explained, not hidden behind words like “discrimination,” which might as well be translated as “don’t even think about it, bigot.”