To start with, let’s remember something else President Obama said: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Not only was this untrue - it was so untrue that The Washington Post fact checker called it “The lie of the year.” At least 5 million people lost their coverage, and probably many more. That is an “adverse effect” by almost anyone’s standards. Many of those folks found coverage elsewhere – but at a higher cost. More about that later. The Congressional Budget Office says that another million will lose their employer-based coverage this year.
The President says “costs are substantially lower.” But how can it be, if we count the subsidies that are the lifeblood of Obamacare. The President touts the fact that some people who once paid $300 a month now get insurance of $50 or so – and that may be so, but that doesn’t mean the insurance now costs only $50 – there is a taxpayer subsidy. There are also many, many people who now paying “substantially more” for their insurance (and one reason their cost is higher is that the insurance they buy is mandated to provide coverages that they do not need, do not want, and in some cases they cannot even use). And whatever the cost is now – wait a couple of years, because the costs for the Obamacare Exchanges and the Medicaid expansion ($35 billion last year) will be $116 billion in 2016. And the President didn’t talk about the state-run Obamacare exchanges. Only seventeen states had them to begin with, and that’s down to thirteen as four have failed. Those failures have cost perhaps as much as $1.2 billion.
Insurance rates are soaring under Obamacare. Remember, not only did the President promise that folks could keep their plan and their doctor (two strikes), but he also promised that premium costs for individuals would be $2,500 lower. (strike three - you're out!) Perhaps tens of millions of people still lack health insurance – even though Obamacare orders they must. And one more thing – as bad as Obamacare is today, it would be even worse if it was still the original law. According to the Galen Institute, the Obamacare law has been changed 51 times since it was passed. Seventeen times by Congress; twice by the Supreme Court and 32 times by the Obama administration itself. And, the Administration has granted many, many waivers, and who knows how much worse the effect will be when the waivers stop. As it stands, the Congressional Budget Office puts the net cost of Obamacare to taxpayers at nearly $1.4 trillion from 2015 to 2024.
The people aren’t being fooled. A recent poll in The Washington Post shows that 54% oppose Obamacare and only 39% support it. The CNN poll says 55% oppose it, although that poll says 43% support it. And those polls were taken before the news came out about the breaches of consumer privacy that have plagued Obamacare.
Obamacare squeaked through Congress in 2010 through subterfuge, with disregard for opposing views and with contempt for the legislative process – and no Congress since then would have passed it – or even come close to passing it. Let’s recap: Congress would not pass it today. The polls say that more people oppose Obamacare than support it. Costs are rising; people have to buy coverage they don’t want. There still are millions of uninsured people. It seems clear that the President’s claims of Obamacare’s success, and his denial of its failure, do not bear up.