"If you like your insurance plan, you will keep it."
"If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period."
These are just some of the many, many, lies (yes lies) President Obama told to the American people in order to pass his signature domestic accomplishment, Obamacare. And as Obamacare's popularity continues to tumble in the polls, Obama is preparing to make a new round of fresh lies to cover up his old ones. Politico reports:
After two months of intense coverage of the botched HealthCare.gov rollout, the president will host a White House event kicking off a three-week drive to refocus the public on the law’s benefits, senior administration officials told POLITICO.
The White House will take the lead in emphasizing a different benefit each day until the Dec. 23 enrollment deadline for Jan. 1 coverage... On Wednesday, the White House and Democratic allies will focus on how Americans are paying less for preventative care under Obamacare. On Thursday, they’ll highlight that people with preexisting conditions can no longer be charged more or denied coverage. And on Friday, they’ll emphasize the slowing growth in health care costs.
There's just one problem, while it is true that people with preexisting conditions can no longer be charged more or denied coverage (although even that problem is wildly exaggerated) Obama's claim that his health care law has slowed the growth in health care costs is a flat out lie. In fact, according to his own administration, the opposite is true.
Here are the facts. According to the the Office of the Actuaries at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, medical spending in the United States is forecast to be 1 percent lower in 2016 than it was predicted to be before Obamacare became law. According to White House advisor David Cutler, this reduction in health spending is due to Obamacare.
But, as Manhattan Institute Charles Blahous has succinctly summarized, that is not what the CMS report actually says. Blahous writes:
Why did CMS lower its estimates of future health spending? It wasn’t because of the ACA. We know this for a fact because CMS has released a memorandum detailing the reasons for changes in their ten-year outlook since April 2010. Here are the factors CMS cited, and the percentage of the improvement each was responsible for:
1)Medicare/Medicaid/other programs “unrelated to the ACA” (50.7% of improvement).
2)Other factors “unrelated to the ACA” (26.1%).
3)Updated data on historical spending growth (21.8%).
4)Updated macroeconomic assumptions (6.1%).
Now, that adds up to 104.7% of the total improvement. The reason these four factors add to more than 100% is that a fifth factor, the “impact of the ACA,” worked against the improvement. Per CMS, adjusting the April 2010 projections for the subsequent impact of the ACA shows it further increasing spending over ten years (equal to and opposite from 4.7% of the total change).
That's right. According to Obama's own numbers, Obamacare will actually increase health spending (by almost 5 percent), not slow it down.
The only real question is if the drive by media will actually call Obama out for his new Obamacare lies, instead of ignoring them like they did before the law was passed.