In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D‑IL) pledged that if he were to become president, by the end of his first term he would sign a law that would reduce family health insurance premiums by $2,500. On February 20, 2010, President Obama delivered his weekly radio address:
The other week, men and women across California opened up their mailboxes to find a letter from Anthem Blue Cross. The news inside was jaw-dropping. Anthem was alerting almost a million of its customers that it would be raising premiums by an average of 25 percent, with about a quarter of folks likely to see their rates go up by anywhere from 35 to 39 percent.
Obama’s HHS secretary was “very disturbed” by these “devastating” increases that “underscore[] the importance of passing real health insurance reform.” Obama continued:
And as bad as things are today, they’ll only get worse if we fail to act.…We’ll see exploding premiums and out-of-pocket costs burn through more and more family budgets.
The solution, he urged, was to enact the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which the Senate had passed two months earlier, on a party-line basis, by one vote:
After debating this issue exhaustively for a year, let’s move forward together. Next week is our chance to finally reform our health insurance system so it works for families and small businesses. It’s our chance to finally give Americans the peace of mind of knowing that they’ll be able to have affordable coverage when they need it most.
Congress did what Obama requested. But talk of reducing premiums by $2,500 per family disappeared. Instead, researchers reported that in Ohio, Obamacare regulations would themselves increase “individual health insurance market premiums…by 55% to 85% above current market average rates” in year one. Obamacare premiums continued to climb at three times the rate of inflation, even after the Congressional Budget Office reported that Obamacare had doubled premiums for most enrollees.
Obamacare attempts to hide those excessive premiums from enrollees by having taxpayers subsidize them. Somewhere along the line, however, supporters realized the subsidies weren’t keeping up with their premiums. In 2021, Congress created additional, temporary premium subsidies for enrollees earning up to $600,000 per year. Obamacare made health insurance so unaffordable, Congress began offering households earning $500,000 premium subsidies of up to $7,000.
Those subsidies expire at the end of 2025. At the same time, we learned this week, Obamacare premiums will rise an average of 26 percent. Unlike Anthem’s 2010 premium hikes, these increases affect not “almost a million” people but all 24 million Obamacare enrollees plus 25 million uninsured folks.
Obamacare supporters’ solution is to make those temporary “enhanced” subsidies permanent, at a cost of $488 billion over 10 years. Much of this money will go toward households earning between $129,000 and $600,000 per year. Yet by 2024, Congress had already spent $694 billion on subsidies to chase rising Obamacare premiums. And it still isn’t affordable.
The CBO projects that current law will already spend $1.3 trillion on Obamacare premium subsidies over the next decade. If Congress makes the “enhanced” subsidies permanent, that amount would rise to $1.8 trillion. If spending $1.3 trillion won’t make Obamacare affordable, how would spending $1.8 trillion?
How long are we going to keep doing this? The United States already has the most expensive health sector in the world. Is throwing more money at health care really all that Obamacare supporters have to offer?
Obamacare is posting what Obama himself called a “jaw-dropping” premium increases. The first $700 billion of government subsidies didn’t fix the problem. Supporters know the next $1.3 trillion won’t, either. And their only idea is to throw yet another $500 billion on the pyre.
If Congress cannot now admit that Obamacare has failed, and move on to real reforms that actually make coverage affordable, what would it take?
