United Liberty

When the debate over health care “reform” started in 2009, President Barack Obama told Americans that more government in order to lower healthcare costs. If anything, Medicare has taught us that government involvement in healthcare has driven up the cost of private health insurance.

The logic behind Obama’s premise was, well, flawed, to say the least. Medicare Actuary Richard Foster has publicly doubted cost savings from ObamaCare and even the architect of his healthcare plan admitted that ObamaCare would do nothing to rein in costs.

But a new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that health insurance premiums have skyrocketed in the last few years. You’re shocked, I’m sure:

During his first run for president, Barack Obama made one very specific promise to voters: He would cut health insurance premiums for families by $2,500, and do so in his first term.

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.

Here is a handy chart from Investor’s Business Daily showing the rise in premiums compared to Obama’s promise to magically lower premium costs:

The editorial board at the Washington Examiner looks at the promises made by Obama and the reality, which everyone who opposed his law saw coming before it ever passed Congress:

[I]n 2010, on the eve of the passage of Obamacare, Obama told the House Democratic Caucus, “Everybody who’s looked at it says that every single good idea to bend the cost curve and start actually reducing health care costs are in this bill.” And on that score, he was dead wrong. Many experts, and even former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, said at that time that Obamacare would cause more, not less, health spending.
[…]
Seniors have also been hit hard by the rising cost of health care since Obamacare became law. Yesterday, Avalere Health, a health care consulting company, reported that premiums for seven of the 10 most popular Medicare prescription drug plans will increase by double digits. Seniors using the Humana Walmart-Preferred Rx Plan, for example, will see their premiums rise by 23 percent, while the Humana Enhanced plan will go up by 11 percent.

“[T]he status quo is unsustainable,” Obama went on to say in his 2009 AMA speech. “If we fail to act, one out of every five dollars we earn will be spent on health care within a decade.” Obama and the Democrats did act. And this June, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported that, even if all of Obamacare’s scheduled Medicare price controls go into effect on schedule, health spending as a percentage of gross domestic product will rise to 19.6 percent by 2021.

If Americans were spending all this money on health care by their own choosing, that would be one thing. The American people should be free to spend money on what they wanted. The flaw of Obamacare, however, which will only become more obvious with every new report, is that it forces some Americans, under penalty of law, to carry a larger and larger share of the price of other Americans’ health care, through higher premiums and mandates and new taxes. This recipe has never before led to lower costs, and it’s already being proved a repeat failure under Obamacare.

Hey, but he got a political victory and more government control over a large sector of the nation’s economy. That’s what passage of the ObamaCare was really about.