How much did health insurance rates go up? It's complicated

Americans could find the new insurance rates for the Affordable Care Act in online marketplaces last week. Prices of many plans went up. But just how much depends on how you measured them. Shortly after the numbers were released, think tanks, consultants and reporters all crunched the data to produce varying estimates of what's happening to insurance premiums in the new marketplaces. (The Upshot, of course, had its own take on the numbers.) The bottom line is that it's not easy to say simply whether premiums are going up, or by how much. The health law set up marketplaces that allow for state regulation of insurance and regional variation in prices.