Obamacare caused millions to lose insurance plans, premiums to skyrocket

Obamacare caused millions of Americans to lose their insurance plans while premiums skyrocketed, according to a new study from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

Former President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) sought to make health insurance more accessible, all while reducing premiums and the government's budget shortfall, and allowing Americans to keep their preferred medical providers. However, individual market premiums surged, hundreds of billions of dollars were added to cumulative U.S. deficits and seven million consumers had their plans canceled following the ACA's passage, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity study found.

"Obamacare has failed in every particular – it failed to make health care more affordable; it failed to improve the health of Americans; it piled on an enormous amount of additional debt on taxpayers; it has principally enriched massive insurance company conglomerates, and it now serves as a major impediment to real heath care reforms that would empower patients and doctors," Phil Kerpen, American Commitment and Unleash Prosperity president and one of the study's co-authors, told the DCNF. "As we show in this paper, every single promise that was made to pass this law turned out to be false."

Obama claimed the ACA would slow the growth in U.S. healthcare spending and "bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family," but individual market premiums more than doubled from 2013 to 2017 and deductibles soared, according to the study.

The disparity between ACA advocates' promises and the legislation's actual effect on costs is largely due to a failure to implement the "Cadillac tax," which was meant to use the proceeds from a tax on employer-sponsored insurance plans to prevent increases in private health insurance premiums, according to the study. The tax was delayed for eight years due to a lack of political support, and was delayed again in 2015 and 2018 before Congress repealed it outright in 2019.

As Americans grappled with rising premiums and deductibles, the number of medical providers willing to accept coverage plummeted, with at least seven million consumers having their plans canceled in the fall of 2013 because they did not comply with the ACA's new mandates, the study found. The wave of cancellations occurred despite Obama sayingin June 2009 that "if you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

Obama also claimed that the ACA would be a "deficit-reducing health care reform," but the study found most of the tax increases that were going to be used to help fund the program have been repealed, and that student loan provisions embedded in the ACA had losses of $32 billion as of 2019.

The U.S. national debt stood at roughly $35.72 trillion as of Oct. 8, up from roughly $13 trillion in the first quarter of 2010 when the ACA was passed, according to data from the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The study also identified several additional "enticing promises" that were untrue, including claims that the ACA would be reserved for U.S. citizens. However, ample Obamacare insurance subsidies now go to insure people who immigrated illegally, as the Biden-Harris administration expanded ACA access in May to include members of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Obamacare also drove employers to move full-time workers into part-time positions in order to avoid ACA rules requiring companies provide 95% of full-time employees health insurance given they employ fifty or more people for more than 30 hours per week, the report found.

"The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made healthcare in the United States anything but affordable," Peter C. Earle, senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the DCNF. "A comparison between what was promised in the lead-up to the passage of the ACA in 2010, and how those assurances have actually played out, is well within the ability of any third grader. Yet there is a curious lack of motivation among intelligentsia in much of the media and virtually all of academia to point out how expensive the ACA has made healthcare for US citizens."

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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