Family Health Insurance Premiums Rose $18,610 since Obama Became President
America Next, a think tank headed by Louisiana Governor Jindal has toted up the cost of President Obama’s broken — and in hindsight absurd — promise to reduce the average family’s health-insurance premium by $2,500 by the end of his first term. In fact, premiums have risen by $18,610. The total cost to the economy is $1.2 trillion. The worst consequence:
Given annual full-time private sector compensation rates, the amount spent on higher health insurance premiums equals the cost of 3.9 million jobs each year, and nearly 6 million jobs in 2013 alone.
Looks like O-care is just one big broken promise.
ObamaCare: Bankrupt health care with a morally bankrupt president.
Family insurance premiums increased $18,000 in 6 years! Talk about a burden. ObamaCare was supposed to ease the burden on families when it came to their health care, not bankrupt them further.
The feedback loop in the marketplace is messy. It consists of consumers balking at paying prices they perceive as too high for a given item. Consumers turn to other stores, cheaper brands, used items or they make due with less. This creates a feedback loop where retailers continually look for ways to entice consumers to purchase their goods and services.
We don’t allow this in health care. Doctors and hospitals are highly regulated. That made them expensive. To pay the bills, the government first encouraged employee health coverage. Later the government decided to provide free health coverage to the poor and elderly. Much later the government mandated health coverage. When poorly-conceived public policies destroyed the feedback loop, policy makers wonder what can be done. What can be done is to reconnect the feedback loop.
“This creates a feedback loop where retailers continually look for ways to entice consumers to purchase their goods and services. We don’t allow this in health care.”
And yet, this is what we desperately need. When insurance companies are competing with each other for people to insure, they are making themselves more attractive to the consumer. Destroying the loop destroys the market.
Shouldn’t the president have to answer for broken promises? He has strong-armed this country into his health care reform and in return, we get the bill for it. I wonder if he has his family under ObamaCare?
Uh, no.
“Given annual full-time private sector compensation rates, the amount spent on higher health insurance premiums equals the cost of 3.9 million jobs each year, and nearly 6 million jobs in 2013 alone.”
Increased premiums result in the equivalency of lost jobs. Goodbye disposable income.
Who believed those promises anyway? I never once took him seriously, because Obamacare had zero chance of actually lowering premiums or improving healthcare outcomes for the majority of the population.
Now, he gets to blame “greedy” insurance companies for the very problems his socialistic policies have created. It’s a case where the public is slow to recognize that government policies are the true culprit.
It’s like he was selling snake oil in the form of healthcare. And when it didn’t work, he blamed the manufacturer.
And yet ObamaCare was supposed to make insurance more “affordable” and easier to obtain? Well, it is obviously not reducing costs as the president claimed it would. So why are people tolerating this kind of deception?
I think that many people are not fed up yet because they are not having to pay the full cost just yet. The subsidized premiums allow for many people to pay less out of pocket than they did before, and so someone else is paying for their health insurance.
The only problem is that eventually you start running out of other people’s money!
How is it possible to attribute the rise in premiums solely to the ACA. Pre-ACA, premiums were rising every year, sometimes in the double digits. Many parts of the bill are still going into effect, or not having gone into effect at all.
I’d like to see what study that link directs us to (it seems to be broken).
I dislike Obamacare as much as the next guy, but these number don’t pass the sniff test. Data from ehealthinsurance (https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/affordable-care-act/price-index) has the average monthly premium (without subsidies) for family bronze plans at $686 (as of July 20), which is an annual premium cost of $8232. (By the way, the “research” cited in the post uses data from ehealthinsurance.) While a bronze plan today will not be the same as a family plan one could have bought in 2008 (or a family health plan not bought on the exchanges), it does not seem a horrible approximation. To believe that annual premiums for the *average* family plan today are $18,610 (let alone increasing by that amount since 2008) strains credulity.
Come on people… use the brains God gave you.
Come on NCPA… you do yourself and your readers a huge disservice by parroting shoddy research like this.
p.s. The link in the post did not work for me, so here is the link to the “research report” (if that’s what you want to call): http://americanext.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/VA-AN-1405-Memo-July-15.pdf
I have not seen these results that Jindal is claiming. This may be true in his state (that did not create an exchange), but that is the Governor’s fault not the administration. I see a dodge here for Jindal whom seems unwilling to take responsibility for what he did not do for his constituents..
I work for a firm that sells health insurance.
Corporate premiums for high quality coverage seem to come in about $19,000 a year in expense states with an older work force.
The ditzy headline about premiums going up $18,000 is senseless. Were these corporations that I work with paying only $1,000 a year before the ACA?
Shabby headline, John.
This does not mean I am pleased about premiums going up. However, the root cause of most premium increases in the business market has to do with stagnant risk pools. If your business has a seniority system and few new young employees, then premiums will go up with or without the ACA.