Peak Irony: Obama Complains About Health Insurance Premium Spike That He Caused

In the final sprint to the midterm elections, former President Barack Obama has hit the campaign trail to stump for Democrat candidates.

One of his favorite talking points? Health insurance premiums, he says, are too high. Apparently, he doesn’t see the irony.

“We’ve got to make sure that nobody has to worry about high healthcare premiums,” Obama declared at a rally in Georgia recently. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s virtually word-for-word the same line Obama was feeding to audiences during his first campaign for president in 2008.

Perhaps the 44th president needs to be reminded that his signature legislative achievement (the one that literally bears his name) was sold to the American public as a cure-all to lower health insurance premiums. Or, perhaps he simply can’t cope with the fact that Obamacare is just as much of an ugly, dismal failure as his grotesque presidential library – a monstrosity that has turned the American healthcare system into a nightmare for virtually everyone.

Either way, voters should feel insulted at how stupid Obama apparently thinks they are. How many times do Democrats expect the public to buy the same lie?

The numbers bear out what a calamity Obamacare has been for American patients.

During his 2008 campaign, Obama famously promised that his healthcare agenda would “lower your premiums by $2,500 per family, per year.” Instead, in the 16 years since Obamacare became law, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family coverage has more than doubled.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), the average family premium was $13,770 in 2010. By 2026, it had climbed to $28,303 – an increase of about 106 percent. By comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index rose from an annual average of 218.056 in 2010 to 336.940 in September 2026, an increase of about 55 percent.

In other words, family health insurance premiums have increased at nearly twice the cumulative rate of overall inflation during the Obamacare era.

And Americans aren’t simply paying higher premiums – they are often paying substantially more before their insurance coverage even kicks in. KFF reports that among workers enrolled in plans with a general annual deductible, the average single-coverage deductible was $917 in 2010. By 2026, that figure had surged to $1,955 – an increase of roughly 113 percent.

The broader cost of healthcare tells much the same story. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S. healthcare spending totaled $8,402 per person in 2010. By 2024, the most recent year for which final National Health Expenditure data are available, that figure had reached $15,474 per person – an increase of about 84 percent.

For families, the numbers are even more striking. The actuarial firm Milliman estimated that healthcare for its typical American family of four with employer-sponsored coverage cost $18,074 in 2010. Its 2026 estimate is $37,824 – an increase of roughly 109 percent. That means the estimated healthcare cost for a typical family of four has also more than doubled since Obamacare was enacted.

The individual insurance market, the segment most directly transformed by Obamacare’s mandates and regulations, saw an even more dramatic shock after the law’s major provisions took effect. A Department of Health and Human Services analysis found that in the 39 states using HealthCare.gov, average monthly individual-market premiums increased from $232 in 2013 to $476 in 2017. That amounts to a 105 percent increase in just four years, while 62 percent of those states saw premiums at least double.

That’s not to even mention Obama’s infamous “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” fib, which PolitiFact ranked as the “lie of the year” in 2013.

All of this adds up to a catastrophe for household budgets that is perhaps unparalleled in American history. Obamacare delivered precisely the opposite of what was promised – and confirmed what conservatives warned about the law from the very beginning. It was always and remains an unmitigated disaster.

But simply ascribing Obama’s complaints about health insurance premium costs to ignorance or stupidity would be letting him off too easy. The dirty little secret that Obama and every Democrat now screaming about “Medicare for All” don’t want you to know is that this was all by design.

Obamacare was never supposed to “fix” the healthcare system or the health insurance industry. It was supposed to break both beyond repair so that Democrats could sell full-scale socialized medicine as the “solution.” Obama lit a fire that the Democrat Party is now promising to put out with more of the same fuel that started it in the first place.

What Democrats realized is that the American healthcare system pre-Obamacare wasn’t perfect, but it was working too well to create the conditions for a full-scale overhaul. So, Obama and his cronies devised a scheme to give a few people cheap healthcare while driving prices for everyone else into the stratosphere. Eventually, they reasoned, everyone would be clamoring for the subsidized plans until the country had a de facto single-payer system.

That plan came into full focus when Republicans repealed the “temporary” COVID-era expanded Obamacare subsidies last year. Democrats have made restoring those subsidies – estimated to cost $383 billion over ten years – their top priority if they retake Congress in the midterms.

So, the next time Obama bemoans the crushing cost of health insurance, voters should remember who sent those costs soaring in the first place. More importantly, they should realize that doubling down on a disastrous policy won’t solve anything.