FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, October 25, 2016
CONTACT: Erin Humiston, (972) 874-5139, or erin@IPI.org
DALLAS – The price of the most popular health plan sold through HealthCare.gov is once again facing a steep hike in 2017—this time by an average of 25 percent, thanks to Obamacare’s mandates and regulations. And should Democrats win the White House, Hillary Clinton will likely use Obamacare’s exploding costs, shrinking networks of physicians, and fleeing health insurers to make the case for what the left really wanted all along: a government-run, single-payer health care system.
“Obama remade the health insurance system, promising repeatedly family health insurance premiums would drop $2,500 by the end of his first term,” said Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) resident scholar Merrill Matthews, Ph.D.
“Anyone who thinks health care prices and spending will go down when you expand health coverage to millions of uninsured, force insurers to cover many more procedures, and pump in hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars is a fool,” said Matthews.
For example, guaranteed issue, the regulation at the heart of ObamaCare, incentivizes people to forgo buying a policy until they get sick and need coverage, and then drop the policy after they get well. “The result is insurance pools that are smaller and sicker, and therefore more expensive,” said Matthews.
“These premium increases have resulted in, and will continue to cause, millions of Americans shifting to very high deductibles, which will push even more younger and healthier people out of the health insurance market,” he said. “The president says we can't go back to the old system that left so many people without coverage, yet millions have had their coverage canceled multiple times under ObamaCare.”
Even Bill Clinton criticized President Obama’s signature legislation. “So you've got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half,” Clinton said recently on the campaign trail.
“Unlike the federal government, health insurers can't run perpetual deficits,” said Matthews. “Hillary Clinton says as president she will fix Obamacare's problems. But why would anyone trust her and other Democrats to fix a system that they broke? Their only solution now is a single-payer system, which arguably was always their real goal.”
ACA Premiums Explode, Could Lead to Single-Payer Under Hillary Clinton