Over at the Huffington Post, Jonathan Cohn warns:
Health insurance premiums for millions of Americans will spike if Congress doesn’t act in the next few months, with particularly big increases in politically contested states, according to a report that the liberal advocacy group Families USA released on Monday morning.
Ever since Obamacare was being debated, supporters of the law have tried to pretend that subsidizing the purchase of insurance is the same as a reduction of the underlying price of insurance — and now they’re trying to advance this same line of argument to push for another expansion of the health care program.
To recap, Obamacare imposes a raft of mandates that drive up the cost of insurance policies while also offering subsidies to help lower-income individuals purchase insurance. When Obamacare went into effect, what became quickly apparent was that there were millions of Americans who were made worse off by the law. These were the ones who were forced to purchase more expensive insurance as a result of the law’s mandates, but who earned too much to qualify for any subsidies.
When President Biden came into office, Democrats tried to disguise this problem this by squeezing a two-year, $54 billion, expansion of Obamacare into the $1.9 trillion spending package touted as “Covid relief.” Essentially, the expansion made the subsidies more generous for a wider number of people. Democrats intended to extend this policy as part of the Build Back Better proposal. Because that never passed, absent action from Congress, the more generous subsidies will go away by the end of the year. But open enrollment for 2023 plans begins on Nov. 1st, meaning individuals will start learning about the effects of the reduced subsidies this fall.
Democrats hope to twist Senator Joe Manchin into supporting some sort of extension and will attack Republicans in the midterms for “raising premiums” by virtue of opposing new Obamacare spending. But let’s be real clear what is happening here. Obamacare drove up the cost of insurance, Democrats tried to disguise this flaw of Obamacare by chasing the higher premiums with more subsidies, and once the subsidies will expire, more people will once again be forced to experience the true cost of Obamacare.