Contrary To Obama's Promises, Health Premiums Rise

Today in Washington, D.C. - Congress is on Recess - Sept. 28, 2011:
The Senate and the House are on Recess. The Senate will hold a pro-forma session on Thursday at 1:45 PM to prevent recess appointments by the President.  The House is expected to be in session on Thursday to endorse with a voice vote the Senate's version of H.R. 2017, funding the government into next week. Then there will be a recorded vote in the House next week to keep the government running through Nov. 18. This second vote allowd conservatives to register their opposition to the spending rates in the stopgap measure.

On Monday, Oct. 3rd, when it will take up the motion to proceed to S. 1619, legislation dealing with China’s currency practices. The Senate will also consider a circuit court nominee and 5 district court nominees.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, “The health-insurance premiums paid by employers rose sharply this year, with the average annual cost of family coverage passing the $15,000 mark for the first time, according to a major survey. The 9% average increase in family premiums for 2011, reported in an annual poll of employers performed by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust, comes despite a continued trend toward more limited use of medical services in the U.S. Last year, family premiums rose just 3%, the survey found. The average annual family premium for 2011 was $15,073, up from $13,770 last year. For a single worker, the figure was $5,429, up 8% from $5,049 in 2010.”

And Bloomberg News added, “The groups’ findings, based on data collected through May, show that health insurance is consuming a bigger share of employer costs, preempting pay raises and making companies pass on more medical costs to their workers, benefit consultants said.”

Importantly, Bloomberg points out, “The health law enacted last year accounts for 1 to 2 percentage points of the premium increases in 2011, said Drew Altman, chief executive officer of the Kaiser Family Foundation.”

Of course, the news of premium increases brings immediately to mind the litany of promises made by President Obama and Democrats in Congress when they jammed through their unpopular health care law. After a meeting with Democrat senators to urge them to push his bill through, President Obama said, “Families will save on their premiums.” And Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) said at the time, “Bringing down costs of health insurance and making it more affordable is job one for this health care reform.” A few months later, President Obama claimed, “Your employer, it's estimated, would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000 percent … which means they could give you a raise.” Six months after he signed the law, the president declared, “All this is going to lower premiums. It's going to make healthcare more affordable.”

As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said earlier this year when federal judges first began to rule parts of the law unconstitutional, “As recently as last week, the President said: ‘This law will lower premiums’, yet since its passage we continually hear the opposite: insurers across the country are raising premiums to cover the cost of all the new mandates they’ll have to comply with. . . . Most Americans have opposed this bill from the start because they were skeptical of all the claims that were being made about what it would do. The process that was used to jam it through made it even less popular. But the reality has been even worse than people feared. It violates the Constitution — which is reason enough to repeal it — it’s driving up premiums, increasing costs, and driving people off the plans they have. . . . Democrats made a lot of promises about this bill. Virtually every one has proved to be empty.”

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