Lies, Loans, and Letdowns

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal offered a stark warning on Obamacare: “Healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage under the federal health law later this year.”

Across the country, schools, businesses, and states are also grappling with increased costs due to the added burdens, regulations, and red tape of the healthcare law. Republicans have long warned that Obamacare would increase costs. But Democrats flatly denied it. Nancy Pelosi insisted as recently as last year, for example, “Everybody will have lower rates, better quality care and better access.”

That’s just not true. Sure, Democrats promised the Obamacare exchanges would make insurance affordable, but in many cases, they will have the opposite effect. The Journal offers an example: 

In Richmond, a 40-year-old male nonsmoker logging on to the eHealthInsurance comparison-shopping website today would see a plan that costs $63 a month from Anthem, a unit of WellPoint Inc. That plan has a $5,000 deductible and covers half of medical costs.  By comparison, the least-expensive plan on the exchange for a 40-year-old nonsmoker in Richmond, also from Anthem, will likely cost $193 a month, according to filings submitted by carriers.

Democrats promised we would all be better off under Obamacare, but as Obamacare draws closer to full implementation, they’ve been proven wrong.

Now that President Obama is well into his second term, he’s gotten in the habit of breaking promises and letting people down.

Yesterday didn’t just bring more bad news on Obamacare. It also dealt a blow to Americans who are paying off student loans. The rates of subsidized Stafford loans doubled from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus (Photo: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

In the last months, President Obama held plenty of campaign-style events promising to keep loan rates from doubling. But when it came time to lead, he and his fellow Democrats in the Senate decided to play politics instead.

Republicans did what the president claimed he wanted to do: prevent rates from doubling. The Republican-led House of Representatives passed a bill in May that would have provided relief. It was based partly on an idea that President Obama had put forward, but once Republicans passed it, he decided to renounce it instead.

Republicans are in the minority in the Senate, but Senators Tom Coburn, Lamar Alexander and Richard Burr were still able to put together a bipartisan piece of legislation that, if passed, would have kept rates down. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked the bill from coming to a vote.

As a result, rates went up—and Democrats can blame no one but themselves.

President Obama’s second term has been a letdown for some of his most ardent supporters, and it doesn’t look to get much better as the scandal-prone IRS gets more power under Obamacare and the president pursues his job-killing climate agenda.

Republicans, for our part, will continue to sound the alarm on Democrats’ too-good-to-be-true promises and will walk the walk to enact real solutions—like student loan relief—when Democrats just want to talk the talk and play politics.

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