Thursday, November 1, 2012

Joe Biden’s Obamacare Joke

The Washington Post reports that yesterday, Vice President Biden made interesting comments in Florida during a discussion about Obamacare:

After it’s all over, when your insurance rates go down, then you’ll vote for me in 2016.

The pool report from the event claimed that Biden “of course, said it in a joking manner.”  Indeed he must have, because the idea that insurance premiums have gone down thanks to Obamacare is a joke of the first order.  Candidate Obama promised repeatedly that his health plan would CUT premiums by an average of $2,500 per family.  The Obama campaign also promised that that those reductions would occur within Obama’s first term.  But as the below graph shows, while candidate Obama promised premiums would fall by $2,500 on average, premiums have risen by $3,065 since Barack Obama was elected President.

To sum up: We don’t know whether or not the Vice President was joking about a 2016 campaign in his future – but we definitely know that his comments about Obamacare lowering insurance rates are a laugher.