Oh, my: Obamacare caused health care premiums to necessarily skyrocket

It seems so, eh, inconceivable that a massive, 2,300-page bill -- which no one bothered to read before Democrats passed it into law -- could result in unintended consequences.

Leaving ObamaCare in place while striking its individual mandate isn't good enough. The full plan must be scrapped before it drives health premiums even higher.

ObamaCare is wildly unpopular with Americans. Even a new CBS-New York Times poll finds two-thirds want it shot down.

...The cost of an average family premium shot up 9.5% in 2011 — the highest rate in seven years and three times the rate of overall inflation, finds a major new survey of employer plans by Kaiser Family Foundation.

Just before Obama signed his health overhaul, he vowed it would "bring down the cost of health care for families, for businesses and for the federal government." In December, he told CBS' "60 Minutes" he was "putting in place a system that's going to lower health care costs."

In fact, there's evidence ObamaCare is fanning medical inflation.

Kaiser attributes the premium spike to "changes from the new health reform law." The 200-page study explains: "Significant percentages of firms made changes in their preventive care benefits and enrolled adult children in their benefits plans in response to provisions in the new health reform law."

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., notes that Obama, as a candidate, promised he'd slash family premiums by $2,500 a year by the end of his first term... The concern is that as ObamaCare becomes a massive Medicaid program that limits reimbursements to providers, it will shift costs massively to those who remain in the private health-insurance market.

Already, Obama's so-called Affordable Care Act has not lived up to its name. It's been anything but affordable — and the worst inflation is yet to come.

Oh, and then there's this:

Despite the [Obamacare individual] mandate, there will still be 27 million uninsured a decade from now, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The promised uninsured rate — 10% in 2022 — isn't much better than in 1980, when it was 12%, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The law also tries to cut the uninsured population by making it illegal for insurers to deny coverage because of preexisting conditions, called "guaranteed issue"....

...But fewer than 4% cited poor health as a reason for not getting coverage, according to the CBO. Meanwhile, 71% cited the high cost of premiums.

....A recent CBO report, for example, says that premiums over the next 10 years will rise at a faster rate than they have for the past five.

Gee, I'm shocked. You mean to say that massive, centrally-planned economies like those of North Korea and Zimbabwe don't work?

Democrats == Schmucks.

As an aside: if there's a better newspaper in America than Investors Business Daily, I have yet to discover it.

Doug Ross