The Obamacare “lower premiums” shell game

You don’t have to look much further than the usual list of suspects to discover that new marching orders have been issued in an effort to salvage the tanking national support of the President’s health care bill. The next line of attack is to begin spreading (dis)information on how Obamacare is already working. How do we know? Because, as featured at one of the President’s biggest cheer leading sites, people are already seeing lower premiums for their coverage!

Growing Number Of States Are Reporting Lower Than Expected Health Care Premiums

Health premiums in Maryland’s exchanges will be “among the lowest of the 12 states that have available proposed or approved rates for comparison,” the state’s exchange — Maryland Health Connection — announced Friday. The news comes just as New York,Oregon, Montana, California, and Louisiana are also reporting lower than expected premiums.

And the good news is out west, also, as seen in Sin City!

Health Exchange insurance plans to cost less in Las Vegas than other parts of state

CARSON CITY — Preliminary costs for the upcoming mandatory federal health insurance coverage show it will be cheaper for Las Vegas residents to buy a policy than it will be for residents of other parts of the state.

State officials gave a preview Friday of how the Affordable Care Act will affect Nevadans. Four companies have signed up to offer health coverage through the state’s Silver State Health Exchange.

Wow. And here we had been saying all along that premiums were going to go up under Obamacare. So I guess we were all wrong and everyone can just go home and begin enjoying their benefits now, right? Well… not so fast. The headlines are carefully scripted to give one impression, but the reality is something else. You have to check with a few sources to find it, though.

Insurance premiums for some consumers in Maryland will go up by as much as 25 percent once ObamaCare takes full effect next year.

The state on Friday released final insurance rates for the private insurance policies available next year through the new insurance exchange created by ObamaCare…

The filings provide grist for both sides of the ObamaCare debate: prices for some consumers will go up next year, but the increases are far lower than what insurance companies initially proposed.

(emphasis mine)

As you see, the prices aren’t actually going down anywhere. They’re just going up less than projected in some places. And beyond that, the first article linked above demonstrates why even that isn’t thanks to Obamacare. It’s from blue state governments trying to bring the hammer down as hard as possible to put some lipstick on this pig.

Officials say they used their authority to deny rate increases to reduce the proposed premiums by “more than 50 percent.” Thirty other states have have similar authority.

So the headlines being pitched attempt to make you think costs are going down. They aren’t. In fact, they are going up everywhere. But hey… it’s not like anyone promised us that Obamacarewould actually reduce rates, right?

Let’s go back in time to when President Obama first began to make the case for his health care overhaul. Here’s how he touted his health plan in May 2007, early in his run for office. “If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change for you under this plan is the amount of money you will spend on premiums. That will be less.” On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama continued to sell the law as a way to lower health premiums, promising at least 15 times to reduce health premiums for families by $2500 on average. And as Buzzfeed notes, Obama didn’t stop pointing to lower premiums when he made it into the White House in 2009. In May of that year, he told C-SPAN that if health industry groups commit to savings—“we end up saving $2 trillion…a lot of those savings can go back into the pockets of American consumers in the form of lower premiums. That’s what we are driving for.”

Far more recently, as Erika already pointed out, Nancy Pelosi was caught flat footed, claiming she didn’t remember anyone ever saying that premiums would go down. Except, of course, that Pelosi herself was saying it as recently as last year. So it should come as no surprise that you’re now going to see a barrage of headlines and talking heads spinning stories about “lower premiums” under Obamacare.

But they’re still lying about it. The people I work with on a weekly basis have already found out about this the hard way, and the rest of you will also.