President Obama and his supporters have said that one of the major benefits of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would be a drop in health insurance premiums. But a new Hewitt Associates study shows that insurance costs will continue to rise for 2011.
The study projects an 8.8 percent average premium increase for employers, compared with a 6.9 percent rate jump in 2010. Additionally, employee contributions toward health coverage are expected to soar by $2,209, or 22.5 percent. This is up 12.4 percent from 2010, when employees contributed $1,966, the study said.
“Employers can expect 2011 health care cost increases to be at their highest levels in five years,” the study said. This report and other recent health economic projections [which] have essentially obliterated the claim that health insurance costs would drop with passage of Obamacare.
In fact, proponents of the health care law have been quick to reverse course on other promises. Ben Smith pointed out in Politico that groups like The Herndon Alliance—whose partners include AARP, AFL-CIO, SEIU, Health Care for America Now, MoveOn and La Raza—have been coaching Obamacare supporters to avoid saying “the law will reduce costs and deficit.”
The President himself has admitted that health care costs would rise “as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care—at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that. We didn’t think that we were going to cover 30 million people for free.”
This is a far cry from the $2,500 savings the President was predicting during the 2008 presidential campaign before Obamacare became a reality. Since its passage, evidence continues to mount that the new law fails to live up to its many promises.
This post was co-authored by Charles Adair.
