Under Obamacare, 65 percent of small businesses will experience an increase in health premiums, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
In total, the report estimates that 11 million American workers will be faced with higher premiums — and that is just for individuals working for small businesses.
But Avik Roy of Forbes, who has been doggedly following President Obama’s signature health legislation, points out today that those numbers are likely on the low side.
He writes,
“But CMS’ projections almost certainly understate the problem, one that will begin to affect millions of workers in the second half of 2014.”
President Obama repeatedly promised that the average family would see a decrease in premiums by $2500. Former Obama aide David Cutler, professor of economics at Harvard University, helped President Obama come up with that number, by the way.
In this 2008 New York Times article, author Kevin Sack wrote that this particular campaign pledge was “one of the most audacious promises in a campaign that has been thick with them…”
Yet this pledge was repeated ad nauseum.
Watch this compilation:
Lisa Desjardins of CNN discussed the politics surrounding the findings. She reported that the CMS report was
“released with little fanfare” on Friday, saying that “neither the HHS website nor the CMS website shows a news release or public notice about the report.”
The Republicans are touting the information, and the Democrats are downplaying it, of course. But the Republican establishment is just as bad, as they did not support efforts to defund Obamacare and in fact vilified Ted Cruz for the “government shutdown,” which he repeatedly said was not his intent (along with Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee), as reported at Tavern Keepers.
Avik Roy explains that some of the cost-increasing aspects of Obamacare were not even considered in the CMS report. He writes,
“But there are other costly requirements that CMS didn’t directly address. For example, Obamacare includes a silly excise tax on health insurance premiums that will get passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices. Same for its taxes on pharmaceuticals and medical devices. The law also requires that all plans cover a broad range of ‘essential’ benefits, some of which they may not already. The law requires that employers cover ‘adult children’ under the age of 26, which is a good deal for those with adult children, but an added cost for everyone else.”
Obamacare was pushed on the American people with broken promises and without one Republican vote. But one of the main selling points was that Obamacare would help people who do not have insurance.
So how many of the nation’s uninsured now have health insurance thanks to Obamacare? Nobody knows. They didn’t keep metrics on that.
As David Nather of Politico writes yesterday,
“When you go to all this trouble to cover the uninsured, is it really that unreasonable to ask how many uninsured people Obamacare has covered so far?
The answer, apparently, is: Yes. It’s unreasonable.”
It seems that as Obamacare wreaks havoc on the American people, the few who supported Senator Ted Cruz in his efforts to defund Obamacare are the only ones coming up roses.
