To hear President Obama or White House press secretary Josh Ernest tell it, the Affordable Care Act is doing just fine. Couldn’t be better. Here’s Obama recently in Elkhart, Indiana:
In the decade before Obamacare, employer-based premiums grew by an average of 8 percent a year. … Last year, they grew by 4 percent—half as fast as they were growing. … Today, the average family’s health insurance premium is $2,600 less than it would have been if premiums had kept on going up at the pace before Obamacare.
Obama is once again being deceptive. To begin with, the 2007 recession and Obamacare’s extremely high deductibles have discouraged health care spending, which keeps premiums lower.
But more to the point, he’s talking about “employer-based premiums.” About 160 million Americans get their health coverage through their employer.
By design Obamacare had a limited impact on employer-provided coverage. That’s because Democrats knew that tinkering too much with employer coverage was the surest way to kill the legislation.
Besides, most medium-sized and larger employers already provided comprehensive health coverage that met most of Obamacare’s requirements (excluding some of the zero-cost sharing preventive coverage).
It was the individual health insurance market, where individuals buy their own coverage in Obamacare exchanges, that was supposed to be the real genius of Obamacare. That’s where the requirement to accept all applicants regardless of health condition would have the most impact. (Employer-based health coverage has done that for decades.)
It’s through the Obamacare exchanges that taxpayers are subsidizing health insurance policies. And it’s in the exchanges that Obama boasts about how many people have signed up for coverage.
It’s the exchanges where liberals were going to prove that they could design a better, more affordable, more competitive, and, of course, more compassionate health insurance marketplace than a free market could.
And it’s in the exchanges where health insurance premiums are exploding. The Dallas Morning News headline says, “Blue Cross asking for a 60 percent rate hike for Obamacare plans in Texas in 2017.” And the Motley Fool reports, “This Is Bad! Obamacare’s Insurer Rate Requests Are Mostly for Double-Digit Hikes.”
And, of course, most of the health insurance co-ops—Obama’s homage to a “public option”—are bankrupt.
Obamacare defenders dismiss these hikes, saying it only represents a small portion—about 13 percent—of the under-65 health insurance market. That’s true, but it’s the part of the market that Obama thought he was fixing and yet is destroying.