It’s that time once again when we see multiple news stories about how great the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is doing.
Don’t you believe it. The real story has always been how Obamacare has failed to live up to Democrats’ sales pitch.
Here’s economist Brian Blase—who served on the White House’s National Economic Council, writing for the Mercatus Center in 2016—identifying some of Obamacare’s failures six years after passage:
- while the percentage of individuals without insurance has declined, enrollment in the exchanges is far below projections;
- exchange enrollees are much older and poorer than expected;
- competition in the individual market has decreased, rather than increased;
- rather than falling, premiums have increased significantly in both the individual and employer-sponsored markets;
- the law’s Medicaid expansion, which is responsible for the vast majority of rate decline in uninsured Americans, came at a far higher cost than expected;
- the law has increased, rather than decreased, overall healthcare spending; and
- the ACA has negatively affected economic growth, despite promises to the contrary.
Those failings are all still with us today. But you wouldn’t know it from the Biden administration and the subsequent news coverage.
On January 13, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released the Obamacare sign-up numbers with this headline: “Ahead of January 15th Open Enrollment Deadline, New Numbers Show 14.2 Million Americans Have Quality, Affordable Coverage—Many With Even Lower Deductibles Under the American Rescue Plan.”
That’s supposed to be a record number of signups. But as the headline indicates, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which passed last March, increased Obamacare subsidies—costing taxpayers an estimated $46 billion over 10 years—so more people could afford it. In addition, the original subsidies have grown as premiums under Obamacare have exploded, insulating people from the higher costs.
But the key point is that President Barack Obama and Democrats expected that virtually everyone would have health coverage if Obamacare passed, and people would be begging to get their coverage through the Obamacare exchanges. About 10 percent of the population is still uninsured.
The primary reason for the decline in the uninsured since 2014, when the law kicked in, isn’t the Obamacare exchanges. It’s the expansion of Medicaid. Indeed, Obamacare may have pushed nearly as many individuals who bought their own coverage out of the market for health insurance—including my wife—as it brought in.
But here’s the way you know for sure that Obamacare has been a failure. Every 2020 Democratic presidential candidate complained about the current health insurance system, offering a range of solutions.
That failing health insurance system they were complaining about is Obamacare.