‘Affordable Care’ Becomes Slightly More Affordable
Insurance companies request rate increases at levels substantially below earlier projections.
As the midterm election campaign season nears the home stretch, one of the major issues Democrats were seeking to exploit has seemingly dried up — the ballooning costs of ObamaCare premiums. Yes, oddly enough, they wanted to hang the catastrophic results of their own law on Republicans for tweaking it. Earlier this year the Congressional Budget Office projected that the average cost of ObamaCare premiums would increase by 15% in 2019. Following this projection, Democrats wailed about how President Donald Trump and Republicans were undermining the Affordable Care Act.
The Leftmedia quickly went to bat for Democrats, with the Center for American Progress predicting that ObamaCare’s “benchmark plan” would shoot up 25% next year, all because the individual mandate had been repealed by Republican tax reform. For example, CAP calculated that rates in Pennsylvania would climb 27%, Wisconsin would rise 28%, and the states of Arizona and Nebraska would increase 29%. By most estimates, Democrats saw the pain of skyrocketing rates as a political club to bludgeon their Republican challengers.
However, insurers are now requesting premium increases at rates significantly less than even the CBO’s early projections. As Investor’s Business Daily explains, “ObamaCare premiums will rise a mere 0.7% in Pennsylvania, according to the state’s insurance commissioner. They will climb by just 1% in Nebraska. In Wisconsin, they’re expected to drop by 3.5%, and drop by more than 5% in Arizona.”
It now appears that Democrats and their cohorts in the MSM will have to turn elsewhere to glean sparse evidence to support their message of a coming Armageddon should voters not elect them back into power. While Republicans did fail in their repeated attempts to repeal the ACA — as is almost always the case, once an entitlement program is implemented, it becomes almost impossible to repeal it in its entirety — Trump and Republicans have been successful in amending some of the most abusive aspects of the law, specifically the individual mandate. And people are going to save a little money.
