Obamacare Promised $2500 Decrease in Cost for Families; Ends up as $3000 Increase
In the second debate with Job McCain in 2008, Barack Obama promised , “We’re going to work with your employer to lower the cost of your premiums by up to $2,500 a year.”
It wasn’t just there, though. He reiterated this numerous times on the campaign trail. Freedomworks has a great compilation to emphasize this:
Well, to quote Freddie Mercury, “ Another one bites the dust .”
Yes, yet another Obama promise has met its expiration date.
With a hat tip to Joel Pollak at Breitbart , Investors Business Daily , we have a study published by the Kaiser Family Foundation that gives us the facts, and they just don’t measure up. Actually, health insurance rates are going up. Per IBD’s report on the study:
But it turns out that family premiums have increased by more than $3,000 since Obama’s vow, according to the latest annual Kaiser Family Foundation employee health benefits survey.
Premiums for employer-provided family coverage rose $3,065 — 24% — from 2008 to 2012, the Kaiser survey found. Even if you start counting in 2009, premiums have climbed $2,370.
What’s more, premiums climbed faster in Obama’s four years than they did in the previous four under President Bush, the survey data show.
There’s no question about what Obama was promising the country, since he repeated it constantly during his 2008 campaign.
The amount families are now paying in premiums is over $5000 more than Obama promised. The graph from IBD tells the story:
The bad news doesn’t end there, though, as Pollak notes:
Obamacare also does nothing to change the underlying incentives driving the rising costs of health care, and in fact makes them worse by adding mandates and reducing patients’ choices.
Over the next four years, if Obama is re-elected and Obamacare is not repealed, the federal government will have to apply cost controls, resulting in the rationing of health care by bureaucrats and/or hospitals.
That is why the Obama administration placed such a heavy emphasis on the Independent Payments Advisory Board–and why vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has spent so much time attacking it .
This should hardly come as surprising news to anyone, though. Conservatives have been saying this for a while . Even Politifact took time away from whitewashing the Obama campaign’s various and sundry other mistakes and falsehoods to rate this one as a “Promise Broken”.
