From Grace-Marie Turner at the Galen Institute:
When President Obama was promoting passage of health reform, he promised that the average American family would save $2,500 a year on health insurance costs. But since the law passed in 2010, costs have risen by more than $5,000.
According a report by the actuarial firm Milliman, a typical employer’s family plan cost a total of $18,074 in 2010 and $23,215 in 2014 — counting employer, employee and out-of-pocket costs.
The Affordable Care Act is not more affordable for those with employer coverage and certainly not for taxpayers. A new study from Bloomberg Government found that the health law so far has cost taxpayers $73 billion — including $2 billion on the website.
That is substantially more than the Congressional Budget Office initially estimated reform would cost by this point. That number doesn’t include projected spending on Medicaid expansion, which brings the cost to more than $90 billion.
So it is not surprising that a new in-depth poll of attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act conducted by Public Opinion Strategies for Independent Women’s Voice shows rising health costs to be the top complaint about the law.
The White House has made headlines saying that premium increases for next year will be modest. But officials cite a selective study focusing on only some of the fewer than 5 percent of Americans who are getting coverage through health insurance exchanges created by the ACA. Some states have reported that average premiums will increase by less than 10 percent, but they will increase by double-digits in others like Florida, Nevada, Virginia and Tennessee.
Read more: Galen Institute
