WhatFinger

Try a $7,450 per year increase instead. Oops!

Remember how ObamaCare was going to cut your premium $2,500 a year? See, what happened was . . .


By Dan Calabrese ——--September 23, 2013

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Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you . . . your president's "signature legislative achievement." Try not to swallow the entire crap sandwich in one bite. Forbes:
It was one of candidate Obama’s most vivid and concrete campaign promises. Forget about high minded (some might say high sounding) but gauzy promises of hope and change. This candidate solemnly pledged on June 5, 2008: “In an Obama administration, we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year….. We’ll do it by the end of my first term as President of the United States." Unfortunately, the experts working for Medicare’s actuary have (yet again[1]) reported that in its first 10 years, Obamacare will boost health spending by "roughly $621 billion" above the amounts Americans would have spent without this misguided law. $621 billion is a pretty eye-glazing number. Most readers will find it easier to think about how this number translates to a typical American family -- the very family candidate Obama promised would see $2,500 in annual savings as far as the eye could see. So I have taken the latest year-by-year projections, divided by the projected population and multiplied the result by 4.

Simplistic? Maybe, but so too was the President's campaign promise. And this approach allows us to see just how badly that promise fell short of the mark. Between 2014 and 2022, the increase in national health spending (which the Medicare actuaries specifically attribute to the law) amounts to $7,450 per family of 4.
Gosh, how did that happen? Oh right. When you tax something, you get less of it. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. And when you make a service free with the promise that a third party must pay for it, the consumption of the service explodes. When that happens, costs go through the roof. Obama's theory was that all the additional competition for insurance policies - since everyone had to buy whether they liked it or not - would add volume and bring down the cost of premiums. Here are just three basic things he missed: Rising demand equals rising prices. Mandatory purchasing equals rising demand. Come on. They really didn't think that through? Adding people with pre-existing conditions to the general risk pool instead of creating a special high-risk pool just for them necessarily explodes the cost of covering care. Obama thought he could "bend the cost curve" by encouraging people to get "preventive care," so the law forces insurance companies to cover preventive visits right off the top with no co-pay. That does indeed increase consumption of preventive care, and since the insurance companies have to pay 100 percent of the bill for those visits, guess what that does to premiums? Exactly. And we're not even dealing here with the insurance policies that disappear - the ones Obama promised you could keep - because ObamaCare makes it impossible for them to continue to exist. And even the New York Times now admits that the few people who will pay lower premiums will get them at the price of fewer choices. In the midst of all this, Ron Brownstein of the National Journal pleads with Democrats to end the ObamaCare debate by demonstrating to the nation that it's working. Well, that would be a neat trick. Sort of like the Houston Astros trying to sell playoff tickets.

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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.


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