Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Obamacare isn't reducing health care costs

"To say it as plainly as I can," President Obama told the American Medical Association in 2009. "Health care reform is the single most important thing we can do for America's long-term fiscal health. That is a fact." Considering that the explosive growth of Medicare and Medicaid spending are the driving forces behind our current deficits, Obama was dead right in that 2009 speech.
But in 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. Now a slew of new reports confirms their analysis.
When he ran for president in 2008, Obama promised he would lower health insurance premiums for families by $2,500 in his first term. But earlier this month, the Kaiser Family Foundation released its annual Employer Health Benefits Survey showing that average family health insurance premiums have gone up by more than $2,500 ($2,730 to be exact), not down. Then, this week, the Health Care Cost Institute released its annual Health Care Cost and Utilization Report showing that, after briefly slowing down due to the recession in 2009 and 2010, overall health care spending rose 4.6 percent last year, far outpacing both inflation and wages.

Read more: http://washingtonexaminer.com/obamacare-isnt-reducing-health-care-costs/article/2509026#.UGMpmhiXasQ

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