Investor's Business Daily EDITORIAL: Obama's Broken Health-Premium Savings Promise
Reform: Leaving ObamaCare in place while striking its individual mandate isn't good enough. The full plan must be scrapped before it drives health premiums even higher.
ObamaCare is wildly unpopular with Americans. Even a new CBS-New York Times poll finds two-thirds want it shot down.
Yes, they're upset over its unconstitutional mandate requiring all citizens to buy a health insurance policy. But that rule doesn't go into effect until 2014. Anger arises from those who are already insured and who have seen their premiums skyrocket under ObamaCare.
The cost of an average family premium shot up 9.5% in 2011 — the highest rate in seven years and three times the rate of overall inflation, finds a major new survey of employer plans by Kaiser Family Foundation.
Just before Obama signed his health overhaul, he vowed it would "bring down the cost of health care for families, for businesses and for the federal government." In December, he told CBS' "60 Minutes" he was "putting in place a system that's going to lower health care costs."
In fact, there's evidence ObamaCare is fanning medical inflation.
Kaiser attributes the premium spike to "changes from the new health reform law." The 200-page study explains: "Significant percentages of firms made changes in their preventive care benefits and enrolled adult children in their benefits plans in response to provisions in the new health reform law."
In fact, 31% of covered workers are in a plan where the employer reported adding preventive services to comply with ObamaCare. And some 2.3 million adult children "were enrolled in their parent's employer-sponsored plan due to the Affordable Care Act," Kaiser said.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., notes that Obama, as a candidate, promised he'd slash family premiums by $2,500 a year by the end of his first term. That was in 2008, when health care coverage cost the average employer and American family $12,680 in annual premiums. Now it's $15,073, nearly 20% higher. That means Obama has broken his promise by a whopping $4,893.
Costs are projected to simply rise as ObamaCare fully goes into effect. A recent McKinsey & Co. study found that 30% of employers will stop offering benefits after 2014, since "the penalty for not offering coverage is significantly below" the costs of the new mandates. This will make millions more individuals eligible for government subsidies under ObamaCare.
Johnson, who founded a manufacturing company and has purchased group health insurance for three decades, joined 39 other Republican senators in a letter to the Congressional Budget Office demanding to know how this will affect costs.
The concern is that as ObamaCare becomes a massive Medicaid program that limits reimbursements to providers, it will shift costs massively to those who remain in the private health-insurance market.
Already, Obama's so-called Affordable Care Act has not lived up to its name. It's been anything but affordable — and the worst inflation is yet to come.