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April 3, 2022

Anybody watching what Obamacare's costs have been doing lately?

By Monica Showalter

This wouldn't exactly be news to anyone who has to buy Obamacare health care insurance...

But for perspective, here's the latest on the 2010 government health care takeover that had been so vaunted in the press as Your-Government-Here-To-Help:

Tripled? We've got 7.9% inflation at last count, so this 'tripling,' even over the course of 12 years, with compounding increments, tops that. 

So much for President Obama's claim that his signature health care bill would cut insurance costs and everyone would be so grateful and happy.

The archived White House website page had all the promises of rainbows and unicorns:

The Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in March 2010, gives middle class families better health security by putting in place comprehensive health insurance reforms that will hold insurance companies accountable, lower health care costs, guarantee more choice, and enhance the quality of care for all Americans.

Obamacare, though, was far from just Obama's baby. Its loudest cheerleader was "b-f-d" Joe Biden:

Who, since then, has continued to tout Obamacare, promising to "repair and renew it" as if such perfection could ever need such a thing, given the hype.

According to Politico, which took us back to the Democrat primaries of 2020:

Many Democrats to [Biden's] left, starting with Bernie Sanders and his “Medicare for All” proposal, called for scrapping the Affordable Care Act entirely in favor of a more sweeping government-financed single-payer health system. Biden resisted. He instead pledged to build on the existing law — a position that kept him in the center of the debate, while reminding Democratic voters of his role in passing the biggest health reform since Medicare.

Obamacare had survived the Trump administration’s attempts to repeal and replace it. Biden promised to repair and renew it. Fully realizing the promise of the sprawling legislation means addressing all three of its goals: expanding coverage, curbing costs and improving the still uneven quality of American health care.

In his first year in office Biden had some early successes getting more Americans covered — but his efforts have since stalled out.

Politico doesn't even get into the fact that the program to cut health care costs has actually delivered soaring costs.

It's bad out there, which highlights the growing failure of the program. Politico notes that various subsidies will be coming to an end just as the midterms start.

Even David Axelrod is complaining:

Axelrod? Wow.

Turns out that Obamacare, which replaced a marketplace of health care plans however imperfect (given that government interference was pretty strong even then), got replaced with a one-size-fits-all government plan of certain requirements and naturally, a monopoly for a few chosen companies that could jump through all the hoops. As entrenched monopolies, that led to the obvious thing -- a cartel that could create higher costs, or whose costs snowballed and could only pass the costs onto consumers. Obamacare was miles ahead of the current inflation now engulfing the country, piling up one hike after another over the course of 12 years well beyond inflation, and we're into 'triple.'

Naturally, the giant corporations, which are masters of scale on a one-size-fits-all program, were the big beneficiaries, as noted in the original tweet, rather than the little guy who's seen his health insurance premiums soar. Giant corporations are wokester outfits these days and all in on donating to Democrats. Funny how that works. Somehow, Democrats always manage to take care of the big guys.

Politico piously claims for Biden:

Equity, for instance, is also about cost, coverage and quality. And cost, coverage and quality are also about equity.

We don't hear much about that from Biden these days. It's not that his minions have not been busy -- but where they have, they've made things worse.

According to MedPage, a trade journal:

[Obama health care advisor Ezekiel] Emanuel's arguments would be more credible if he had identified even one ACA policy that reduced costs. But the only ACA policy he mentioned was a program that, he writes, "required reducing ... wasteful readmissions."

This would be the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), a dangerous program that should be terminated immediately. The HRRP's proponents claimed it would cut costs and improve health by penalizing hospitals for "too many" hospital readmissions. But the evidence now indicates this program is backfiring. Well-controlled studies show the HRRP may have raised the mortality rate among heart failure and pneumonia patients by reducing necessary readmissions, and it has not cut costs.

We share Emanuel's commitment to an efficient healthcare system with evidence-based price controls. But cheerleading from academic leaders about the false achievements of futile, and sometimes harmful, cost-containment policies has unintended consequences for health and efficiency, and it undermines our ability to build a universal, affordable healthcare system. We already have reliable methods to evaluate the successes and failures of national cost-control policies. Congress and the President must base future health policies on solid evidence of benefits without patient harms. And if we have the guts to be honest, we will acknowledge that learning from failure can be the key to future success.

Biden himself, though, has done nothing except continue to defend this money-eater.

It comes on top of skyrocketing oil costs, rising home prices, out-of-control education costs, and inflation not seen since the days of Jimmy Carter. But sitting in the background, there's always the big spectacular inflationary record of health insurance premiums, led by Obamacare, which Biden has defended and entrenched as president.  That's part of the failure of big government and all its false promises. And it's also the Biden record for incompetence alongside all the other failures of his administration.

Image: Screen shot from FacebookDay video posted on YouTube

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