Obama Twitter Acct Brags That Health Care Premiums Are Lower Than Predicted

Debra Heine

It’s like this president lives in an alternate universe….

Obama optimistically predicted in March of 2010 during a speech in front of an Ohio audience, that premiums would decrease by 3000%. Is he saying that they’ve decreased even more than that? 

The independent National Journal’s analysis found that premiums are higher under Obamacare as a result of employers weigh dropping coverage.

Part of the president’s assertion may come from the Kaiser Family Foundation report that was released a few weeks ago, showing that premiums under Obamacare are “lower than expected.” 

Avik Roy of National Review Online pointed out a rather glaring flaw in their analysis:

 Its authors did not actually measure whether or not Obamacare would increase premiums relative to what they are today, because they claim it would be too “complicated.”
So if the Kaiser authors didn’t compare Obamacare rates to pre-Obamacare rates, how do they arrive at their conclusion that premium increases will be “lower than expected?” 

By comparing rates in 2014, under Obamacare, to rates “implied” by a Congressional Budget Office projection about premiums in 2016.

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That is to say, what matters to the Kaiser authors is not whether rates will go up relative to what they were before Obamacare. What matters is whether rates will go up by even more than the CBO predicts. Their thinking can be summarized this way: If a car today costs $10,000, and the CBO predicts the same car will cost $15,000 next year, next year’s price is “lower than expected” if the price only goes up by 40 percent, instead of the predicted 50 percent.

See Twitchy for twitter reactions to Obama’s tweet.

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