FACT CHECK: Premiums Would Rise Under Obama Plan

Is it too much to ask for integrity coming out of the Obama administration?

The arrogance of this president is so amazing to me. He thinks by the force of his personality that he can change the foundations upon which this country is built.
It’s not working Mr. President!

You’re lies and deception are being brought to likght faster than you can read them from your teleprompter.

Yahoo News reports:

Buyers, beware: President Barack Obama says his health care overhaul will lower premiums by double digits, but check the fine print.

Premiums are likely to keep going up even if the health care bill passes, experts say. If cost controls work as advertised, annual increases would level off with time. But don't look for a rollback. Instead, the main reason premiums would be more affordable is that new government tax credits would help millions of people who can't afford the cost now.
Obama asked his audience for a show of hands from people with employer-provided coverage, what most Americans have.
"Your employer, it's estimated, would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000 percent," said the president, "which means they could give you a raise."

A White House press spokesman later said the president misspoke; he had meant to say annual premiums would drop by $3,000.

It could be a long wait.

"There's no question premiums are still going to keep going up," said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research clearinghouse on the health care system. "There are pieces of reform that will hopefully keep them from going up as fast. But it would be miraculous if premiums actually went down relative to where they are today."

The statistics Obama based his claims on come from two sources. In both cases, caveats got left out.
A report for the Business Roundtable, an association of big company CEOs, was the source for the claim that employers could save $3,000 per worker on health care costs, the White House said.

The budget office concluded that premiums for people buying their own coverage would go up by an average of 10 percent to 13 percent, compared with the levels they'd reach without the legislation. That's mainly because policies in the individual insurance market would provide more comprehensive benefits than they do today.

For most households, those added costs would be more than offset by the tax credits provided under the bill, and they would pay significantly less than they have to now. However, the budget office estimated that about 4 in 10 customers shopping for an individual policy would not be eligible for tax credits — and would face higher premiums on average than without the legislation.

The premium reduction of 14 percent to 20 percent that Obama often cites would apply only to a portion of the people buying coverage on their own — those who want to keep the skimpier kinds of policies available today.

Their costs would go down because more young people would be joining the risk pool and because insurance company overhead costs would be lower in the more efficient system Obama wants to create.

The president usually alludes to that distinction in his health care stump speech, saying the savings would accrue to those people who continue to buy "comparable" coverage to what they have today.
Full story

Via Yahoo News

Via Memeorandum

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