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Article snippet: Insurers’ requests for premium increases in 2018 varied widely amid uncertainty surrounding how the Trump administration will implement ObamaCare, a new analysis finds. The Kaiser Family Foundation analyzed initial premium requests from 21 major cities, and found the rate requests ran the gamut from a 5 percent decrease in Providence, R.I., to a 49 percent increase in Wilmington, Del. Some areas saw more modest increases or virtually no change. Premiums generally wind up being similar or equal to insurers’ initial requests, but this year is different. It’s quite possible the rates could change, the analysis noted, as insurers still lack certainty about whether the federal government will continue critical payments to insurance companies or enforce the penalty for going without health coverage. “We still would have seen premium increases in many of these states even without the political uncertainty," said Cynthia Cox, a co-author of the analysis and associate director for Kaiser's Program for the Study of Health Reform and Private Insurance. "But if the Trump administration had been more clear about what the rules were going to be for next year, we would likely have seen much smaller premium increases,” she said. The insurance plans took different approaches to crafting their rate requests. Some factored in the uncertain environment. Some states asked insurers to file two sets of rates, with the second including a big increase if the federal government discontin... Link to the full article to read more