Nov
2
Obamacare’s Broken Promises
I write this post on November 1, the beginning of another round of enrollment into “Obamacare” — i.e., healthcare provided via the deceptively-named Affordable Care Act (ACA), which President Obama signed into law in 2010 (see image). Obama and the Democrats made many promises about the legislation, and Fred Lucas — chief news correspondent and manager of the Investigative Reporting Project for The Daily Signal — recently took a look at those promises. In brief, he noted the following four broken promises:
Promise #1: “Your Premiums Will Go Down”
While campaigning in Cincinnati, Obama once said,
“You should know that once we have fully implemented, you’re going to be able to buy insurance through a pool so that you can get the same good rates as a group that if you’re an employee at a big company you can get right now, which means your premiums will go down.”
To the contrary, as you have likely experienced for yourself, average premiums have instead increased. As explained in a Heritage Foundation report from August 2024,
“The average deductibles for bronze-level plans sold on the exchanges increased by 40 percent between 2014 and 2024. For self-only coverage, the average deductible was $5,094 in 2014, but is $7,144 in 2024, while the average deductible for family coverage has increased from $10,278 in 2014 to $14,310 in 2024.”
If your premiums have actually gone down, it is probably because “15 states have obtained federal waivers from some Obamacare provisions.”
Promise #2: “Competition Where There Wasn’t Competition”
Obama said in 2013,
“What we’ve done is essentially create a competition where there wasn’t competition before. We created these big group plans, and now insurers are really interested in getting your business. And so, insurers have created new health care plans with more choices to be made available through these marketplaces.”
Reality?
“[T]wo-thirds of states, or 34 states, and the District of Columbia had fewer insurers offering exchange coverage in 2024 than a decade earlier, before the Affordable Care Act was implemented. On the slight upside, eight states had more insurers offering plans on the Healthcare.gov exchanges in 2024 than they had before the Obamacare law was passed, while eight others have the same number.”
Promise #3: “Not ‘One Dime to Our Deficits’”
When the bill was introduced in Congress in 2009, Obama vowed,
“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future.”
As per Lucas…
“The initial score by the Congressional Budget Office in 2010 estimated the legislation would reduce the federal deficit. However, the cost of Medicaid expansion was higher than projected, as was the cost of subsidies, which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic…. Before the COVID-19 subsidies, Obamacare enrollment was stable. In 2019, 13.7 million individuals drew a subsidy. By just the first quarter of 2025, that reached 26.7 million — nearly double.”
As Brian Blase, president of Paragon Health Institute, put it:
“Obamacare is not affordable, and has narrowed network plans to exclude certain doctors and hospitals. The only people purchasing are, for the most part, getting giant subsidies…. [I]t’s still a heavily regulated market, which decreases competition, and they receive massive subsidies.”
Promise #4: “‘Savings’ From Medicaid Expansion”
Said Obama in March 2010,
“The insurance reforms rest on everybody having access to coverage, and you also don’t do anything about the fact that taxpayers currently end up subsidizing the uninsured when they’re forced to go to the emergency room for care, to the tune of about a thousand bucks per family. You can’t get those savings if those people are still going to the emergency room.”
Lucas points out that “[a]lmost 20 million newly eligible able-bodied adults enrolled in Medicaid from 2013 to 2023” and “emergency room visits from the new Medicaid enrollees have increased.” According to a report by the Paragon Health Institute last October,
“As a result of expansion, existing Medicaid enrollees have had more challenges obtaining doctor appointments. According to a 2019 meta-analysis, prior to expansion, Medicaid enrollees were half as likely as those with private insurance to get appointments, while they were only one-third as likely after expansion — a decline by one-third.”
In short, Obamacare was based on false assumptions and is woefully inadequate to handle reality, let alone with the sorts of monetary savings promised. It’s a major fail!
Lucas’s article isn’t long, but if you’d like a few more relevant facts, you can read it here.
