Obamacostlier Than We Thought-O-Care
At ABC.com, Jake Tapper lays out some of the fiscal realities of Obamacare:

On May 3, 2008, the president told voters that he had "a health care plan that would save the average family$2,500 on their premiums."

Last year workers at the flower shop saw their insurance premiums shoot up 41 percent.
"I basically work for the health care payments," says manager Pat Cowhig, whose husband has medical issues.

The Kaiser Family Foundation shows family premiums topped $15,000 a year for the first time in 2011, increasing a whopping 9% this year, three times more than the increase the year before. The study says that up to 2% of that increase is because of the health care law's provisions, such as allowing families to add grown children up to 26 years old to their policies.

So what about that $2,500 in savings the president pledged? White House deputy chief of staff Nancy-Ann DeParle insists families will see that savings -- by 2019.

The Kaiser study also indicates employers are switching plans and shifting costs onto employees. Half of workers in smaller firms now face "deductibles of at least $1,000, including 28 percent facing deductibles of $2,000 or more," according to the study.
Flora Venture's new policy increased the deductible employees pay to $5,000.

Doesn't that fly in the face of the president's promise that "if you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan"? ABC News asked DeParle.

She said no -- the president wasn't saying the legislation would guarantee that everyone can keep his or her preferred plan, just that the legislation wouldn't force anyone to change.

Again, what Obamacare didn't do was modernize our health care in this country by disconnecting health insurance from the workplace, just for starters. We don't work just one job from young adulthood to retirement these days, but we still have a health insurance system that's set up for it.

Our elected numbskulls passed a health care plan that fails in so many ways to respond to reality and that often just thumbs its nose at it entirely, it's just crazy. Remember...it was too big and long and complicated to read, so they passed it so they could find out what's in it.

If you voted for someone who did that, why aren't you now campaigning to have them recalled for breach of office, for starters, and breach of the most rudimentary intelligence after that?

More here at Forbes.com. Merrill Matthews, formerly director of a small free market health insurance research and advocacy group, talks some simple sense:

I was in the middle of the fight against ObamaCare. Trying to explain to Democrats and their staffs why the legislation would make health insurance premiums explode was like banging your head against the Berlin Wall.

They would mindlessly--almost zombie-like--regurgitate the liberal talking points, asserting that if we could just get everyone in the health insurance pool, premiums would go down, not up. Didn't President Obama repeatedly promise that premiums would fall $2,500 for a family by the end of his first term?

So the government:

•Provides coverage to an additional 45 million to 50 million uninsured Americans--note that the uninsured spend less than half of what the insured spend on health care, so their spending will rise significantly;

•Requires insurance to cover lots of additional treatments and services, in many cases free of charge to the patient; and

•Guarantees that people will spend very little out of pocket, which insulates them from the cost of their decisions;
And the president argues--well, he used to argue, until the facts could no longer be denied--that total health care spending would go down!

Every aspect of the current health insurance system that makes health care so expensive--requirements to cover lots of additional therapies, limiting patients' cost exposure, and subsidizing the most expensive health plans (through employers or the government) so that more people will choose them--is in ObamaCare ... on steroids.

Another example from Matthews in the comments:

Actually, fredlinn, I had a car analogy but cut it out so as not to get too long. Here's what it said: "Suppose someone claimed that if the government required everyone to have a Cadillac loaded with options and subsidized the cost to ensure that every American could buy one, then the total amount of money the country spent on automobiles would go down, you'd think that person was a lunatic."