Wednesday’s prediction of Obamacare doom came with a pretty blunt headline: “O-care Premiums to Skyrocket.” It accompanied an article, written by Elise Viebeck of the Hill, in which some anonymous insurance company officials predicted that premiums in some Obamacare exchanges would increase sharply for 2015. One official, from a “swing state,” actually said his firm was planning to triple its rates. It was only a matter of time before it became part of the right-wing conversation, which means—I’m just guessing—it’s only a matter of time before it’s part of a Koch Brothers ad on your local television station.

As usual, the real news here is more complicated and ambiguous. The possibility of higher-than-normal rate increases in some parts of the country is real enough, for several reasons. Chief among them: Insurance companies may have expected a better mix of beneficiaries—in other words, more healthy people and fewer sicker ones. If so, the companies could discover that the premiums they set for this year are too low to cover the medical bills they must pay to doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and the like. If that happens, the insurers could respond by raising premiums next year, perhaps substantially. Serious, honest people are worried about this scenario unfolding, based in part on rumblings they are picking up from within the insurance industry. “There is extensive concern about rate increases next year,” Caroline Pearson, vice president of Avalere Health, told the Fiscal Times. “Particularly since exchange enrollment is skewed toward older enrollees, some are concerned that plans will need to raise prices in 2015.”

But as Pearson also pointed out—and as all the "could"s and "if"s in the above paragraph imply—nobody really knows what’s going to happen. That includes the insurers themselves. Open enrollment hasn’t even ended yet. People can sign up for insurance until March 31 and, by all accounts, the pace of enrollment has quickened with the deadline approaching. Historically, young and healthy people have been the last to sign up. That’s certainly where the Obama Administration and its allies are focusing outreach efforts, with appeals via sports celebrities, over social media, and, of course, between the ferns.

It’s also not clear exactly what insurers were expecting in the first place—or how widely spread the anxiety over enrollment patterns is. As the very same Hill story noted, insurance company executives have been relatively sanguine lately, both in public statements and, more recently, in anonymous quotes for other outlets about the new insurance system’s stability. The confidence from those statements could simply be happy talk, designed to calm nervous investors. Then again, the angst in Wednesday’s Hill story could also be its own form of propaganda, designed to put pressure on Obama and his allies at a time when they are weighing how much to cut payments to the insurers who participate in the Medicare Advantage program.

Then there’s the key qualifier of the Hill story: the word “some.” Everybody treats Obamacare like its one big insurance market. As Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Foundation noted on twitter, it’s 51 insurance markets, one for each state plus the District of Columbia. And within the larger states, the premiums can vary substantially from one region to the next. Premiums in some places might go up by a lot, while premiums in other places might go up by only a little. A key factor will be the level of competition. In areas with many companies vying for business, insurers are likely to keep rates low for the same reason they have so far: They won’t want to lose customers. But in rural areas and states where one insurer predominates, carriers will have more leeway to raise prices—and some are likely to use it.