Washington Post: Obamacare was Never Actually Affordable

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

The Affordable Care Plan (Obamacare) was never affordable, admits the editorial board of the Washington Post. The same council that praised Obama’s “signature achievement” finally revealed what the American people so clearly experienced–healthcare costs rose.

“The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare] was never actually affordable,” the Post declared, adding, “assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.”Socialistic policies never result in savings. Regulatory mandates under the ACA required insurance companies to cover everyone and anyone with pre-existing conditions without any medical underwriting.

Healthier and younger Americans were forced to subsidize the costs. The general public was forced to pay for services they did not need and at a higher rate. As a single man, I was forced to purchase child and maternal care coverage, for example. The average individual market premiums skyrocketed by about 129% from 2013 to 2019, more than double what they would have been if Obamacare were not enacted when adjusted for broader medical trends in inflation.

By 2015, the average American was paying 10% of their income toward health insurance. Some mistakenly believed that this socialist mandate would benefit the poor. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute found that 10% of people earning two to five times the federal poverty level were paying over 20% of their incomes to Obamacare.

“You basically have an individual mandate that requires you to pay a significant amount of income between premiums and out-of-pocket costs,” one researcher said. “Those high costs, he said, “will make a lot of people think it isn’t worth it.” That 10% to 20% of stolen wages was in addition to mandated government taxation toward Medicare and Social Security.

The Obama Administration touted that 70% of new insurers would only pay $75 per month for their plan. You’d be lucky to pay $75 for a week of mandatory coverage, AND that coverage is nowhere near sufficient to prevent the average American from slipping into lifelong medical debt in the event of sickness or injury.

Millions of people were forced to purchase health care coverage despite the costs. The number of available plans declined, the number of patients assigned to doctors rose, and quality suffered significantly. The headline promise that Americans would be able to keep their preferred doctor was a lie. It is clear to see who benefited from Obamacare since the American people clearly did not.

Hence why legislators were immune from participating in the program–rules for thee but not for me. There is a widespread belief that Obamacare was intended to fail in order to push forth universal healthcare coverage. Jonathan Gruber, an ACA architect, admitted that the policy was deceptively complex to elude the Congressional Budget Office. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” Gruber said in a 2013 panel discussion.

“The stupidity of the American voter,” as Gruber so eloquently explained, is precisely what government relies on when it attempts to pass these extreme measures.