Freedom Line Blog

A new report says that the number of Americans who are ‘underinsured’ is 31 million people – double the figure from 2003.

Being underinsured means that a person has access to health insurance, but doesn’t use it to get healthy because the cost is too high.

ObamaCare – with the popularity of its high deductible insurance plans – may make the problem worse.

“The steady growth in the proliferation and size of deductibles threatens to increase underinsurance in the years ahead,” says the Commonwealth Fund report.

“People who have high deductibles do tend to skimp on healthcare,” Sara Collins, the study’s lead author, said to reporters.

That’s because a trip to the doctor’s office can generate thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses before the insurance company contributes a penny.

The Obama administration has claimed a lot of credit for lowering the uninsured population, but has been unsurprisingly mum about the uptick in the number of underinsured Americans. If this trend continues, millions of people will be forced to pay for a financial product they cannot afford to use, but dare not risk going without since the IRS has the power to penalize.

That sounds like a policy opportunity conservatives would do well to exploit.

H/T: The Hill

As ObamaCare’s next open enrollment period draws near, some of the controversial law’s biggest backers are cheering a seven city survey claiming that health insurance premiums associated with it are dropping.

This leads liberal health policy expert Ezra Klein of Vox to say that “Obama’s signature accomplishment is succeeding beyond all reasonable expectation.”

But not if you get your health insurance from your employer, however.

“Employees are on the hook for more and more of their health care costs. Premiums are increasing so slowly in part because employers are continuing to shift toward higher deductibles, requiring employees to pay more out of their own pockets before their health care plans kick in,” explains Sam Baker in National Journal.

Comparing monthly premium rates year-to-year makes sense if that’s the best single indicator of how ObamaCare is impacting paychecks. But it isn’t. For employees working in the real economy the shift to high deductible plans means more out-of-pocket spending every time they visit the doctor.

Translation: ObamaCare makes health insurance for workers more expensive.

When it comes to measuring ObamaCare’s success, we need to make sure we’re looking at the most relevant data. Otherwise, we risk scoring political points at the expense of the truth.