Obamacare Delenda Est

With John Roberts' surprising decision last week, the fate of the country's healthcare system has been thrown back to the people, who have one last chance to kill Obamacare before it kills them by electing Mitt Romney President, electing a GOP majority to the Senate and holding the House in November.

Hyperbole? Maybe. But if the current state of the UK's NHS is any indication of where we're headed, and I think it is, the gravity of the situation facing us is pretty clear.

Avik Roy, the excellent healthcare blogger at Forbes, has a good piece over at NRO on the do-or-die nature of November's election and what conservatives must do to win the day. Short version: we need to remind our friends and neighbors why Obamacare is so bad, and fast:

... there is one aspect of Obamacare that, above all others, will matter to the broadest swath of American voters: the degree to which the law drives up the cost of health insurance. And this is the message that opponents of Obamacare must hammer home.

When President Obama was campaigning in 2008, he repeatedly promised that Obamacare would reduce, on an absolute level, Americans’ health premiums. “We’ll start by lowering premiums by as much as $2,500 per family,” candidate Obama said in October of that year.

But the opposite has happened. In 2011, the average family health plan cost $15,073, a jump of $1,303 — 9.5 percent — from 2010, the year that the president signed Obamacare into law. Over the same period, median household income increased by only 4 percent, from $49,445 to $51,413. That means that, for the average family in 2011, health premiums amounted to a staggering 29 percent of household income.

Read the whole thing, and we'll have much, much more on this topic over the coming weeks here at the HQ. But let me remind you what Obamacare's architects view as the end-state of their grand plans ...

posted by Andy at 09:33 AM

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