JEC Report on Obama’s $800 Billion Broken Promise
Sen. DeMint has released a JEC Member Viewpoint (available online here) quantifying the cost of President Obama’s broken promise to reduce premiums, which reveals another way Obamacare has fallen short for the American people. The report finds the cumulative cost (through 2012) of Obama’s broken promise on premiums is $805 billion. During the past four years, the average family has spent $12,230 more on private health insurance than candidate Obama promised, while the average individual has spent $4,163 more. What’s more, the $805 billion cost of President Obama’s broken premium promise “is equivalent to the cost of private-sector employers supporting an average of 3 million jobs each year between 2009 and 2012.”
Even as the Administration attempts to trumpet its medical-loss ratio rebates as a “benefit” of Obamacare, the below chart demonstrates how $1.3 billion in rebates for both 2011 and 2012 will be dwarfed by the more than $800 billion cost of Obama’s broken premium promise:
Four years ago, candidate Obama repeatedly promised premiums would go down by $2,500 – and his campaign advisors told the New York Times that “we think we could get to $2,500 in savings by the end of the first term, or be very close to it.” But as today’s report demonstrates, struggling American families – to say nothing of the American economy as a whole – have paid dearly for President Obama’s failure to deliver. Any way you slice it, that’s not reform.