Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, is out with his latest estimates of how Obamacare is affecting health insurance premiums around the country. Though the employer market is difficult to calculate and data is hard to come by, he’s made estimates for the small group and individual markets.
If you’ve felt like your insurance has gotten more expensive, well, you’re right: Gottlieb estimated an 11% increase in price in the small group and a 12% increase in the individual market. And it looks like it’ll keep getting worse.
This doesn’t look great for price-sensitive Americans who have feared that Obamacare will ruin the market for insurance – and certainly runs counter to the trumped-up claims from the Administration that Obamacare is engineered to lower insurance prices.
In 2009, the Congressional Budget Office forecast what insurance premiums would be in 2016 due to Obamacare. They found that in 2016 we should have expected a 10-13% increase in the individual market, which means that prices need to freeze right now for that to come true. It’s unlikely to be the case. What’s more, though, they predicted no change for the small-group market. Prices have skyrocketed there, and show no signs of slowing down.
Obamacare was sold to the American people on a boatload of broken promises, and it looks like we can toss “bend the cost curve” and “lower premiums for the average family by $2500” onto the bin of lies.
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