Rebates NOT an Obamacare “Game Changer”
Various press outlets are reporting on an Administration-hyped story about how medical loss ratio rebates will turn into a “game changer” for the President’s unpopular health care law. However, this leak to a reporter yielding a favorable story misses several key points:
- As we reported last month, a Kaiser Family Foundation study found that rebates would average $127 for about three million individuals who will directly receive the rebates. The study itself admitted that the overall rebates are “not particularly large in many instances.” By contrast, nearly four million seniors in the Medicare “doughnut hole” received $250 rebate checks in 2010 – and that didn’t stop seniors from expressing their outrage about Obamacare at the polls that November. If a $250 rebate check sent to 4 million people in 2010 didn’t persuade seniors to support Obamacare in 2010, why would a rebate check averaging less than half that amount, and sent to fewer individuals, be a “Game Changer” in 2012?
- The Kaiser Family Foundation also notes that premiums for families in employer-sponsored insurance went up by $1,303 last year alone – premiums averaged $13,770 in 2010 and $15,073 in 2011. How is an average rebate covering a mere 10% of last year’s premium increase a “Game Changer” for struggling middle-class families?
- More importantly, candidate Obama repeatedly promised that premiums would go DOWN – and not by tens or hundreds of dollars, but by thousands. For instance, in a speech on February 27, 2008, he said that “We’re going to work with you to lower your premiums by $2,500 per family per year. And we will not wait 20 years from now to do it or 10 years from now to do it. We will do it by the end of my first term as President.” But as the below chart demonstrates, while candidate Obama promised that premiums would go DOWN by $2,500, they actually have gone UP by nearly as much – from $12,680 in 2008 to $15,073 in 2011, according to Kaiser data. Given that candidate Obama promised premiums would go down by $2,500, how does a $127 rebate check represent a “Game Changer” and not a promise broken on a massive scale?
Favorably leaked stories to reporters aside, a $127 rebate won’t even begin to make up for the $2,400 in premium increases families in employer plans have faced just since Barack Obama was elected – let alone the $2,500 in premium reductions they were promised under Obamacare. That’s the real “Game Changer” here.
