Jack Hellner writes for the American Thinker about “skyrocketing” health care costs for seniors.
As Milton Friedman always said, governments cause inflation. Thus, the government is behind the massive increase in college tuition. That affects a lot of people, but what affects even more is health care. Join me as I explain how the falsely named Affordable Care Act (ACA) (Obamacare) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) have caused massive inflation in healthcare and health insurance costs since 2009.
In 2009, when the average cost of an individual health policy was under $100 and family coverage was under $400, democrats decided that health insurance cost too much, and too many didn’t have coverage.
Therefore, without any Republican support, they wrote a 1,000-page bill. They called the bill the “Affordable Care Act,” a misnomer intended to mislead the American people into supporting the bill. The mostly compliant media went along and chastised those who dared question the bill.
There were thousands of pages of additional regulations and many new taxes, along with the takeover of student loans, to pretend the bill was paid for. Democrats also falsely told the public that the bill would substantially lower premiums.
In fact, the bill took away freedom of choice and reduced competition. It got rid of lifetime and annual limits, so small and medium-sized companies couldn’t afford the risk. There was also no incentive for medical providers to control costs.
As prices soared, instead of limiting the scope of their promises about how the government would fix healthcare costs, the Democrats have instead worked to increase subsidies and increase the income levels of individuals and families who can get the subsidies. They needed more people to sign up to make it seem as if the ACA is popular and necessary. This just increased premiums even more and made insurance more unaffordable.
Something the Democrats intentionally left out of the bill that could have potentially reduced premiums and medical costs was any limits on punitive, not compensatory, damages in lawsuits. They left it out because Democrats receive significant sums of money from trial lawyers.
