With more Americans having an unfavorable view of Obamacare than favorable and Clinton continuing to take credit for the law on the campaign trail, establishment Democrats are beginning to realize another (non-email, non-charity, non-vote-fraud-related) crisis looms for Hillary - the problem of dramatically higher Obamacare premium hikes in an election year. With the redistribution and disincentive to work that we already detailed about to get considerably worse, Senate leader Mitch McConnell asked pointedly, "maybe Democrats think the middle class should just get over double-digit premium increases..."
As we detailed previously, for all those currently enrolled in healthcare plans administered in the following states, this is how much, on average, your plans will go up by.
Obamacare premiums are expected to rise more sharply than they have in previous years, and Republicans are seizing on the issue for electoral advantage; and as The Hill reports, Donald Trump and Senate Republicans discussed ObamaCare premium hikes at a private meeting this month and agreed they could help the GOP in the election.
Republican senators took turns heading to the Senate floor this month to denounce ObamaCare premium hikes.
“Maybe Democrats think the middle class should just get over double-digit premium increases,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “Maybe Democrats think it’s funny that millions of Americans lost their plans because of ObamaCare. Republicans think we should work toward better care instead.”
Clinton has acknowledged that high costs remain a problem under ObamaCare, while defending the health law and its benefits overall.
“I think that the Affordable Care Act is a big step forward for the vast majority of Americans, but we have to look at out of pocket costs, co-pays, deductibles, premiums,” Clinton said at a roundtable discussion this month when a woman asked her about her premium increasing by $500.
When asked by another woman about premium hikes in March, Clinton noted at a CNN town hall that ObamaCare “has done a lot of really good things, but it has become increasingly clear that we are going to have to get the costs down.”
ObamaCare premiums likely won't be the most prominent issue in a campaign that's seen Trump often dominate the news cycle with brash statements about any manner of topics.
And Trump has his own vulnerabilities on healthcare. He has tacked between different positions on issues. An analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget also found that his plan would lead to 21 million people losing their health insurance because it would repeal the coverage gains from ObamaCare.
Still, as proposed ObamaCare premium increases roll in, they are gaining attention.
Democratic strategist Brad Bannon said the premium increases are “a real problem, because Americans, I think, expected there'd be some sort of leveling off in [the cost of] healthcare insurance.”
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in January found that 44 percent of the public had an unfavorable view of the law, while 41 percent had a favorable view.
More recently, though, the unfavorables have ticked back up due to Democrats unhappy the law does not go further, the Kaiser Family Foundation found.
Clinton is with those trying to improve the law, which could give her cover with voters.
Many of her solutions tack to the left. Most prominently, she supports the “public option,” a government-run health insurance alternative to increase competition.
* * *
Simply put, It's official: years of warnings that Obamacare will lead to dramatic increases in healthcare premiums are about to be validated... and the presidential candidate running as Obama 2.0 will be hard-pushed to sweep this under the middle-class-need-help, "well, I'm a woman" carpet of her normal talking points... as her solution is "more government" yet again.