Thanks Jimmy. A couple things to take from it:
"It’s not clear whether a lot of people actually expected premiums to go down — but there’s already a perception that the law has increased the cost of insurance, which is feeding the negative attitudes. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released this week found that 49 percent believe the law has “significantly increased the price of health insurance.That’s not true. An Aon Hewitt survey of health plans found that health insurance premiums on average rose 12.3 percent in 2011 — but only an average of 1.5 percent can be attributed to the health law. And health premiums had been rising for years before the law was passed."
"
"But what is true is that what most people pay for their insurance — either through higher premiums or bigger co-pays and deductibles — aren’t rising more slowly. That’s because the main drivers of rising costs — including technology, expensive new drugs, an aging population, a surge in chronic diseases, and Americans’ propensity to use a lot more health care than many other countries, even if it doesn’t make them any healthier — have nothing to do with the law."
"“President Obama repeatedly promised during the health care debate, ‘if you like your current plan, you will be able to keep it,’” House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans said in a statement Friday...Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) cited the 20 million figure, saying: This law keeps getting worse and worse; it needs to be repealed.
Supporters of the law say it’s not as bad as all that. The 20 million figure is the extreme scenario, they point out — CBO says that 3 million to 5 million is more likely. And that’s out of the 161 million Americans who would have had workplace health insurance before the law was passed.
Even in that case, the number is misleading, according to Topher Spiro of the Center for American Progress, because CBO says about 3 million wouldn’t be forced out. They would leave their workplace coverage voluntarily — possibly for better coverage, with subsidies, through the law’s new health insurance exchange"
The devil is in the details on both sides of the issue.
Read more:
Health care reform: Four inconvenient truths - POLITICO.com