T
he Washington Examiner‘s Paul Bedard recently discussed the upcoming massive premium increases due to Obamacare predicted by a wide array of studies:
Health insurance companies, facing new and costly rules and regulations jammed into Obamacare, will boost the premiums on younger Americans as high as 189 percent as they try to recover the new costs imposed by Washington, according to a joint House-Senate report. Families could see premiums rise to $7,186.
In an exhaustive review of 30 studies on the impact of Obamacare, the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Senate Finance and Health, Education, Labor & Pensions committees concluded that younger individuals who now pay a premium of $648 a year will be paying $1,872, a 189 percent jump, once the health reform law fully takes effect.
As the Washington Examiner‘s editorial board pointed out, these huge premium increases are hard to square with Obama’s pledge that his “healthcare bill” would “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.” The Associated Press and others have noted that the healthcare law that Obama signed breaks several other campaign promises he made in 2008. Most Americans will also bear the brunt of a $63-per-head fee imposed on their health insurance plans by the Obama administration. As the Associated Press notes, the new fee, “buried in a recent regulation,” will “likely to be passed on to workers” in the form of higher premiums or lower wages.
Obamacare is also resulting in more unnecessary medical tests, wasting more of doctors’ time, and increasing medical billing costs. Obamacare is also causing layoffs in the medical device industry. Even liberal Democrats in the Senate, such as Al Franken, are admitting the medical-device tax contained in Obamacare will wipe out many jobs. In a statement in December, Franken called it a “job-killing tax” that will “impair American competitiveness in the medical device field.” Employers are now cutting full-time workers and replacing them with part-time workers to avoid Obamacare mandates that apply to full-time employees, as the Huffington Post and Fox News have chronicled. Obamacare will reduce employment by an additional 800,000 because of work disincentives and bizarre income-cliffs. The Dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, noted that Obamacare will reduce life-saving medical innovation.
