The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services building is seen, April 5, 2009, in Washington. About 500,000 people who recently lost Medicaid coverage are regaining their health insurance while states scramble to fix computer systems that didn’t properly evaluate people’s eligibility after the end of the coronavirus pandemic, federal officials said Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023. Alex Brandon/AP

If Obama-Biden healthcare policies are so good, why do costs keep rising?

Washington Examiner October 23, 04:01 AM October 23, 12:01 AM Video Embed

The costs of Obamacare and its Biden-era add-ons are becoming intolerable.

When President Barack Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) bent legislative rules to pass Obamacare 13 years ago, critics rightly scoffed at their claims that it would expand access to health insurance and control costs.

HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUMS SOAR IN 2023

Healthcare inflation has continued to raise prices in the rest of the economy, as was always obviously going to be the case despite Democratic falsehoods, and the massive costs to taxpayers also keep growing. The latest numbers on health insurance premiums and dangerous additional levels of government debt condemn both Obamacare and President Joe Biden’s policies that are driven by the same flawed assumptions.

For most people, it is the direct costs of premiums that hit hardest. KFF, a health policy think tank, reports this week that the average cost of employer-based health insurance premiums for family coverage has reached nearly $24,000. That’s 7% more than last year, nearly doubling the broader inflation rate.

Insurers typically pick up 25%-38% of those costs, which means even families with generous employers are paying 62%, or about $15,000 a year, out of pocket. For single coverage, the average premium rose to $8,435, also 7% up from 2022 and nearly three times as much as in 2013. If individual premiums had risen at the same rate as overall inflation, those costs would only be about half as high.

Almost 153 million people depend on employer-sponsored healthcare coverage.

“It’s just an incredible amount of money to spend on health insurance every year,” said KFF’s Matthew Rae, who co-authored the report.

A big driver of costs, under Obamacare as a whole and due to Biden’s regulations, is the nearly indiscriminate use of government subsidies. Biden keeps trying to force unnecessary coverage onto people who don’t want or need it, such as requiring elderly men to buy insurance that covers pregnancy services. Both Obama and Biden ration the supply of care by deterring innovation that otherwise would occur through research and development.

Higher subsidies chasing rationed services is a recipe for what always happens when expanded demand chases limited supply: price hikes.

Meanwhile, Biden is pushing rules changes, reversing President Donald Trump’s, that make things even worse. Using a “government knows best” approach, Biden wants to outlaw inexpensive plans that young, healthier people choose, on the theory that ordinary people don’t know what’s good for them.

No less important is that Obama and Biden’s policies are hurting workers. The subsidies they push come from the federal Treasury, which means taxpayers. The result is upward pressure on tax rates and government debt that slows down prosperity now and burdens future generations.

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Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute wrote last week that numbers from the Congressional Budget Office show the federal government spent a “jaw-dropping” $1.8 trillion this year on healthcare subsidies. That number is rising rapidly. In the next 10 years, government officials are set to spend $25 trillion on such subsidies. Those subsidies alone, not to mention all the private sector healthcare costs, are projected to be as large a percentage of the economy as the entire U.S. finance and insurance sector was at the start of this decade.

For the private and public economies, Obamacare and its Bidencare are unsustainable. Lawmakers must eliminate government controls and subsidies and replace them with market incentives.

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