Commonwealth Fund Gives Obamacare an Epic Fail
The liberal Commonwealth Fund is out with a supposedly non-partisan comparison of the campaign health care plans offered by President Obama and Governor Romney. There are many charts, graphs, and statistics in the 50-plus page report, but you really only need to read one phrase in the introduction to get the gist: “growth in health care costs and premiums exceeds that of family incomes…”
That of course is far from what candidate Obama promised. Four years ago, Barack Obama repeatedly promised that he would cut premiums – not slow the rate of growth, but CUT them in absolute terms – by $2,500 per family. Jason Furman – then a campaign advisor, and now a senior Administration official – went even further, telling the New York Times that “we think we could get to $2,500 in savings by the end of the first term, or be very close to it.” But while candidate Obama promised premiums would fall by $2,500 on average, premiums have risen by $3,065 since Barack Obama was elected President. (A visual representation of this broken promise is below.)
The Commonwealth study does its best to compensate for this broken promise, by using the best possible assumptions about the rest of Obamacare. For instance, to obtain better insurance coverage numbers for Obamacare, the report assumes that every state will implement the law’s Medicaid expansion – even though several states have already pledged not to do so, and the Congressional Budget Office agrees that many states will not. But no matter how you slice it, even a liberal think-tank like Commonwealth has to admit that – on the metric struggling families care about most – Obamacare has been a massive failure.
