... and this underplays the effect, because the plans being sold under the ACA have a higher cost basis for insurers than pre-ACA plans do. You can easily observe this for yourself if you're in a major insurance market by calling up an insurer and asking for prices on non-ACA-compliant plans, which are still sold.

> If the RNC wanted to show what has happened to employer-sponsored premiums under the Affordable Care Act, it should have started the clock in 2010, the year the law was passed. But that makes Obama look better. The rate of growth in average premiums from 2010 to 2014 is 22 percent.

That's why factcheck should not be used to check... facts. Just as they claim the RNC have twisted this and that to make themselves looks better factcheck is twisting things here as well, to make someone else look better. Health insurance providers had raised premiums in anticipation of the vote and the legislation passing. So it's specifically important to look not at 2010 when it was signed into law but a few years below when there was this uncertainty about it. One way market deal with uncertainty is to hedge their bets. "Not sure what will happen, but this might pass, and why don't we just raise the rate now" kind of idea.

I've heard this directly from the health insurance representative who came and told us told us, "sorry but rates are going up sharply because we anticipate this new legislation".

They anticipated Obama care in 1999? Obama only took office in 2009.

Not they didn't.

But they did during 2009. By July, a number of bills were already approved by committees in the House. And the Fall is usually when the companies get prices for the next year. So it went up sharply then. Then in again in 2010. Price is not always comparable because the level of coverage had also changed. We had to get new plans and while they covered some mandatory free procedures and didn't have lifetime maximum, they had also bigger deductibles and a reduction in options and procedures covered.

So you are saying we should consider one year earlier in the analysis?

We should look at bit earlier 2009 at least.

That doesn't mean we'll find a larger jump there, I found it for my self, but the KFF study shows there wasn't in general. However discarding date legislation has passed is also dishonest as factcheck did. Companies which are affected by regulations monitor them closely and adjust to them correspondingly.

Even then, the ACA came up pretty quickly after Obama got elected, they had one or two years to back up premiums, and premium increases seem to have remained steady during that time. What the ACA did do is outlaw junk insurance policies that were cheaper but not useful as health insurance.

Of course they do. Raise the deductible 5-10x and you can claim some pretty interesting "premium reduction" numbers.

Deductibles haven't 5x'd (let alone 10x'd) under the ACA, which, for what it's worth, caps deductibles. Before Blue Cross made it annoying to do this, we did the standard HSA+HDHP plan (most young families should HSA+HDHP), and it was a little annoying getting a bronze plan from BCBS with a deductible high enough to qualify as an HDHP for our HSA.

For some context, the Kaiser family foundation's 2016 Employer health benefits survey available at http://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2016-summary-of-findi... suggests that the average in-network deductible for a single worker has increased from $917/year in 2010 (when the ACA was passed) to $1,478/year in 2016 -- not adjusted for inflation. While more people are using high-deductible plans, the growth in any specific plan type (eg, HMO) is about the same.

Without adjusting for inflation, this growth is ~60% growth in 6 years, or a doubling time of ~9 years. After adjusting, it's more like 40% over the same 6 years or a doubling time of ~12 years.

The article I linked to includes links to peer-reviewed research by the Kaiser Family Foundation. They look at the actuarial value (how much of your health costs the plan actually covers) to compare apples-to-apples. If you care about these subjects, I really encourage you to dive in and learn about them, rather than throwing out unsubstantiated anecdotes.