If Obama and Biden’s health care policies are so good, why do costs continue to rise?

TThe costs of Obamacare and its Biden-era additions are becoming intolerable.

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

HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUMS SOAR IN 2023

Health care inflation has continued to drive up prices throughout the rest of the economy, as it always would have done despite Democratic lies, and the massive costs to taxpayers continue to grow as well. The latest numbers on health insurance premiums and dangerous additional levels of government debt doom both Obamacare and President Joe Biden’s policies, which are based on the same flawed assumptions.

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

Insurers typically cover 25 to 38 percent of these costs, meaning that even families with generous employers pay 62 percent out of pocket, or about $15,000 a year. For individual coverage, the average premium rose to $8,435, also 7% higher than in 2022 and almost three times higher than in 2013. If individual premiums had increased at the same rate as overall inflation , these costs would have been only about half.

Nearly 153 million people rely on employer-funded health coverage.

That’s simply an incredible amount of money to spend on health insurance each year, said KFF’s Matthew Rae, co-author of the report.

One of the biggest cost drivers, under Obamacare as a whole and because of Biden’s regulations, is the almost indiscriminate use of government subsidies. Biden continues to try to impose unnecessary coverage on people who don’t want or need it, such as requiring older men to buy insurance that covers pregnancy services. Obama and Biden are rationing the supply of care by disincentivizing innovation that would otherwise occur through research and development.

Higher subsidies to drive out rationed services are a recipe for what always happens when increased demand drives out limited supply: price hikes.

Meanwhile, Biden is pushing for rule changes, unseating President Donald Trump, making the situation even worse. Using a government-knows-best approach, Biden wants to ban low-cost plans chosen by younger, healthier people, based on the theory that ordinary people don’t know what’s good for them.

No less important is that Obama and Biden’s policies hurt workers. The subsidies they claim come from the federal treasury, that is to say from taxpayers. The result is upward pressure on tax rates and public debt, which slows current prosperity and weighs on future generations.

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Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute wrote last week that Congressional Budget Office figures show the federal government spent a staggering $1.8. thousand billion this year on health care subsidies. This number is growing rapidly. Over the next ten years, government officials are expected to spend $25 trillion on such subsidies. These subsidies alone, not to mention all private sector health costs, are expected to represent as large a percentage of the economy as the entire U.S. financial and insurance sector did at the start of this decade.

For the private and public economies, Obamacare and its Bidencare are not viable. Lawmakers must eliminate government controls and subsidies and replace them with market incentives.