Obamacare's Michigan Tale: Small Drop in Uninsured While Families Pay More

The Affordable Care Act is failing to deliver on its promises to provide health care access and affordability. While some people now have new coverage, it has come at the expense of families who lost the health care coverage and doctor that they liked, or are now without insurance because they can no longer afford it.

Here are four things to know about Obamacare in Michigan:

1. Contrary to popular belief, Obamacare was never designed to dramatically expand private health care coverage; it has always been a massive Medicaid expansion scheme. In Michigan, federal figures show 303,000 residents were added to Medicaid rolls between the third quarter of 2013 and the end of 2014, compared to federal claims of 311,000 health insurance exchange enrollments. (Those claims may even be inflated; evidence from last year suggests the real exchange enrollment is closer to 250,000).
2. Instead of seeing a dramatic reduction, Michigan's uninsured population dropped by just 1.7 percentage points after the first exchange enrollment period – from 12.5 percent in 2013 to 10.8 percent in 2014. In fact, for every person who signed up for private coverage, another was thrown into an already-strained Medicaid program.
3. If you like your health insurance, you can’t necessarily keep it. Bureaucrats in the Obama administration wrote regulations that deemed millions of policies substandard. These regulations have thrown millions off the private coverage they had and into the ACA exchanges.
4. Rather than save the average family $2,500 in premiums every year as the president repeatedly promised, many have seen their premiums skyrocket. In Michigan, the average family of four is now paying 12 percent more as a result of the ACA, and for many individuals the cost has more than doubled.

Naomi Lopez Bauman is the director of health policy for the Illinois Policy Institute, and Jack McHugh is senior legislative analyst for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.