[ObamaCare] is working…We haven’t had a lot of conversation about the horrors of Obamacare because none of them have come to pass. You got 16 million people who’ve gotten health insurance.
It hasn’t had an adverse effect on people who already had health insurance. The overwhelming majority of them are satisfied with the health insurance…
The costs have come in substantially lower than even our estimates about how much it would cost. Health care inflation overall has continued to be at some of the lowest levels in 50 years. None of the predictions about how this wouldn’t work have come to pass.
Barack Obama, June 8, 2015
Sometimes it seems President Obama lives in a parallel universe where facts are floating around to be plucked out of suspended animation. Never more so than on the effects of the Affordable Care Act.
So let’s see whether anything he says on the new law, including that it “is working,” comports with the facts:
● No “adverse effect on people who already had health insurance.”
In 2013, as Obamacare’s policies were phasing in, nearly 5 million policyholders across 31 states and the District of Columbia were notified that their current coverage was being discontinued. This doesn’t include nearly 20 states that weren’t tracking these numbers so the total could have been several million more. In California alone, 1.1 million policies were canceled.
In March, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that Obamacare will result in a total of 1 million fewer people enrolled in employment-based coverage in 2015, increasing to 8 million fewer enrolled in employment-based covered by 2018. That’s a lot of people who haven’t been able to keep the health insurance that they like.
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● “The overwhelming majority of people are satisfied” with the new law.
Real Clear Politics has reviewed the major polling results on ObamaCare over the last two months. It finds that the average result is that 43% of Americans support the law and 53% oppose it. A May Gallup poll found more than twice as many respondents (24%) say the law has hurt their families than say it has helped them (10%). Most say it has made no difference. This sounds a lot more like dissatisfaction with the new law.
Sebastian Robertson
