The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, but it wasn't fully implemented until this year. That gave the Republicans four years to tell outrageous lies about the program (commonly called Obamacare). One by one, those lies have been exposed. But there is one that couldn't be exposed until we saw what was going to happen with insurance premiums. The Republicans had claimed that Obamacare would cause a huge rise in the price of insurance.
The cost of premiums went down in many states because of the provision that at least 80% of money raised through premiums must be spent on medical care for consumers. But what was going to happen in the second year to those premium prices? Would they rise more than normal as the Republicans claimed?
We now know the answer to that question -- and it is NO. The Kaiser Family Foundation, one of the most respected sources on what is happening with medical care, has checked on the premium prices in a large city in every state for 2015. What they found is illustrated in the four charts below. Premium prices rose in some state and dropped in others -- but even in the states where the prices rose, it was a smaller rise than in past years (before Obamacare was fully implemented).
The premium prices I have shown are for the Silver Plan -- the most popular plan. And for the United States as a whole, the average premium price did not rise at all -- it fell by 0.2%! For the cheaper Bronze Plan, the average price rose by 3.2% -- a much more modest rise than premiums have exhibited in the past.
This exposes the last of the outrageous Republican lies -- that Obamacare would cause a drastic rise in premium prices. The truth is that, just as the program architects predicted, Obamacare has fostered competition among the insurance companies -- and that new competition has kept prices down.
But...but...Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!
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