It is difficult to say with certainly which of the many whoppers
President Obama told tonight took the most crust to utter, but my
money is going on this assertion, made a few minutes into the
speech: “Already, the Affordable Care Act is helping to slow the
growth of health care costs.” I know “Orwellian” has now become
rather hackneyed, but there is simply no other adjective that
better describes this statement. It is not merely a lie. It is the
precise opposite of the truth. It is just as absurd as “war is
peace” or “freedom is slavery.”
Portents of this stretcher began appearing over the weekend in
the usual media outlets, and a particularly transparent harbinger
appeared in Forbes of all places. In a column titled, “New Data
Suggests Obamacare Is Actually Bending The Healthcare Cost Curve,”
Rick Unger writes that “A new Congressional Budget Office report
out last week has the healthcare world scratching its head over the
possibility that Obamacare might—in part—be responsible for what is
being described as a significant slowdown in the growth of
healthcare costs in America.”
It hardly needs to be said that the report to which Unger refers
fails to support his or the President’s claims. First of all, the
slowdown began before Obamacare passed. Specifically, it began to
manifest itself in an obvious way during 2009. Moreover, cost data
are only available through last year: “National health expenditures
grew at an estimated annual rate of 4.3 percent in 2012, a bit
higher than the 3.9 percent experienced for each of the years
2009-2011. While this estimate is subject to revisions, it portends
a fourth consecutive year of record-low growth.”
In other words, the President and his media toadies are
crediting Obamacare with a slowdown that began a year before it
passed and four years before the law took effect. Thus, having set
the bait in his headline, Unger switches to the primary reason for
the slowdown: “To be sure, a big part of the decline in healthcare
spending is the result of the recession’s impact.… Indeed, up until
this point, most analysts have agreed that the poor economy was
pretty much the sole cause for the improvement we have seen in
containing the explosion of healthcare spending.”
Unger makes much of the fact that Douglas Elmendorf, director of
the CBO, is cautiously “willing to say that a ‘significant part’ of
the savings are the result of structural change in how healthcare
is now being delivered.” But even the New York Times admits that “A
major question raised by Mr. Elmendorf and others is whether the
spending will accelerate again. (It slowed in the 1990s only to
pick up again last decade.)” The Gray Lady quotes former CBO
director Douglas Holtz-Eakin thus: “Premature celebration never
makes sense when it comes to health care.”
Meanwhile, more objective observers are a good deal less
sanguine about Obamacare’s effect on health care costs. The Wall
Street Journal, for example, puts it as follows: “Health-insurance
premiums have been rising—and consumers will experience another
series of price shocks later this year when some see their premiums
skyrocket thanks to the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.” Why?
Because Obamacare forces health insurers to accept everyone,
forbids them from charging more based on the insured’s medical
condition, and includes numerous coverage mandates whose upward
pressure on premiums I wrote about years ago.
All of this puts upward pressure on health care costs in
general. When Obama was running for President, he promised to save
the average family a lot of money in insurance premiums. But the
Wall Street Journal goes on to point out, “Although President Obama
repeatedly claimed that health-insurance premiums for a family
would be $2,500 lower by the end of his first term, they are
actually about $3,000 higher — a spread of about $5,500 per
family.” It would have been interesting to hear Obama address that
point in his State of the Union address.
Listening to Obama’s address on Tuesday night, I was reminded of
something I read last week from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and
Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer was, of course, a German theologian
who lived during the Hitler era. Unlike today’s progressive
poseurs, he spoke truth to power when it cost something. While
sitting in a cell, awaiting death for that crime, he wrote: “For
evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity,
or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our
traditional ethical concepts.”
No, I’m not comparing Obama to Hitler. But I am saying that the
never-ending stream of prevarication that emanates from the White
House and its media toadies is indeed bewildering to anyone who
tries to live honestly. And most of the propaganda is specifically
designed to camouflage crimes against democracy like Obamacare.
That abomination is not helping to slow the growth of health care
costs. It is driving them through the roof. Obama lied yet
again.
