Medical insurance premiums in the United States are on the rise, the chief architect of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul has told The Daily Caller.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who also devised former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s statewide health care reforms, is backtracking on an analysis he provided the White House in support of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, informing officials in three states that the price of insurance premiums will dramatically increase under the reforms.
In an email to The Daily Caller, Gruber framed this new reality in terms of the same human self-interest that some conservatives had warned in 2010 would ultimately rule the marketplace.
“The market was so discriminatory,” Gruber told TheDC, “that only the healthy bought non-group insurance and the sick just stayed [uninsured].”
“It is true that even after tax credits some individuals are ‘losers,’” he conceded, “in that they pay more than before [Obama’s] reform.”
Gruber, whom the Obama administration hired to provide an independent analysis of reforms, was widely criticized for failing to disclose the conflict of interest created by $392,600 in no-bid contracts the Department of Health and Human Services awarded him while he was advising the president’s policy advisers.
Gruber also received $566,310 during 2008 and 2009 from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a study on the Medicare Part D plan.
In 2011, officials in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Colorado ordered reports from Gruber which offer a drastically different portrait in 2012 from the one Obama painted just 17 months ago.
“As a consequence of the Affordable Care Act,” the president said in September 2010, ”premiums are going to be lower than they would be otherwise; health care costs overall are going to be lower than they would be otherwise.”
Gruber’s new reports are in direct contrast Obama’s words — and with claims Gruber himself made in 2009. Then, the economics professor said that based on figures provided by the independent Congressional Budget Office, “[health care] reform will significantly reduce, not increase, non-group premiums.”
During his presentation to Wisconsin officials in August 2011, Gruber revealed that while about 57 percent of those who get their insurance through the individual market will benefit in one way or another from the law’s subsides, an even larger majority of the individual market will end up paying drastically more overall.
Will be sadly funny, watching Obama and a potential nominee Mittens, both trying to defend their shared healthcare guru and his reevaluation of his original analyses.
Lies. While it’s true with Obama’s compromise with the GOP, they allowed insurance companies to continue to make obscene profits, there is a cap in place.
I’m going to say upfront that I only read the first sentence. I wish that all these damn Liberals be they DemonKrat or Repubickans would die. Period, end of sentence. I’m retired/unemployed/self-employed and my health care, insurance, has almost tripled. Overnight, literally. Between energy prices skyrocketing, food prices heading to the stratosphere and health care becoming astronomical, the only thing that still reasonable is my Bible, my Guns, my Ammo and my Constitution.
@UpChuck.Liberals: Well spoken!
Where’s this guy Gruber been? Health care premiums went up shortly after the passage of “Obamacare”
@liberalmann: This is very similar to the CA government trying to control energy costs. They liminted the cost utilities can charge consumers while the price of energy kept going up for the utility companies. What does anyone expect when government gets involved!
Since the bill had to pass so we could read it, we are now discovering minefields throughout it.
After reading about “free” birth control, I wonder how many other items are also “free” in this bill. I pay co-pays on my prescriptions, why are there none on birth control prescriptions in this bill?
How much more expensive is the cost of ObamacAre because of the lack of co-pays?
Hi Ditto,
Healthcare insurance companies raised their premiums ahead of obamacare being
voted for (before anyone read it)
They did this because they knew that it would cost a lot more to cover students living with parents
until age 26..
They also feared that there would be price controls put in place, if rapidly rising premims might affect the 2010 election outcome.