Referring to President Obama’s health-care program before it was enacted, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.”
As we find out what is in it and how it affects all of our lives, it’s obvious just who was pumping in the fog and why.
Obama’s most insistent claim over the course of the debate was that everyone would be able to keep his or her own health insurance. But critics insisted there was no way that was going to happen. They said that by 2014, employers would be forced either to drop their health-insurance plans and pay a fine, or to change their plans to meet the government-knows-best mandatory standard of coverage.
Why are employers making changes to their health plans every year? Because costs have been shooting up faster than inflation and profits. Democrats promised that would change, but a month after passage of Obamacare, a report issued by the president’s chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said that overall health-care costs would actually go up under the new program. So much for the Democrats’ promise.
That report came after several major companies, including Caterpillar and Verizon, informed their shareholders that they were anticipating billions of dollars in additional health-care costs as a result of Obamacare. Last month, in a Towers Watson survey of 661 companies, 94 percent expected Obamacare to increase their costs. Eighty-eight percent intended to pass on these higher costs to their employees, while 74 percent planned to reduce workers’ health-care benefits.
It seems that significant changes in Americans’ health-care plans are on the way. And they’re not changes for the better.
Read the rest of Santorum’s column in the Inquirer
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