Photo Credit: Fox NewsBy Peter Morici.

It took paramount arrogance for President Obama and congressional Democrats to believe they could write an Affordable Care Act that would replace free markets across a health care sector as large as the economy of France.

Among the results include five million Americans with private insurance who are getting cancellation letters for policies the president promised they could keep. As Obama claims, some had “substandard” coverage, but many had perfectly good policies.

Stories are surfacing of cancer patients — now facing the loss of insurance policies that paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in life-saving treatments — who cannot access the government run exchange. Or, if they are successful, their premiums are now dramatically higher, and they can no longer access the clinics and doctors that kept them alive.

Businesses around the country are replacing full-time employees with part-time hires to avoid paying rising, burdensome premiums for qualifying workers.

Others are simply dropping coverage altogether and electing to pay fines when those apply in 2014.

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No grounds for claim that ObamaCare lowers healthcare costs

By Charles Blahous.

Public support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has plummeted now that the oft-repeated claim that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” is widely understood to be untrue. Despite previous assurances, millions of Americans are now grappling with ACA-triggered cancellations of their health insurance policies. Faced with public anger, ACA supporters are now turning to another argument to promote the law: that the ACA is already working to hold down health care cost growth. Unfortunately, some of these claims are just as groundless as the ones that misled so many Americans to believe they would be able to keep their previous coverage.

One particularly egregious example is White House advisor David Cutler’s op-ed published November 8 in the Washington Post, entitled, “The health care law’s success story: slowing down medical costs.” This piece contains the following paragraph:

“Before he was criticized for his statements about insurance continuity, President Obama was lambasted for his forecasts of cost savings. In 2007, Obama asserted that his health-care reform plan would save $2,500 per family relative to the trends at the time. The criticism was harsh; I know because I helped the then-senator make this forecast. Yet events have shown him to be right. Between early 2009 and now, the Office of the Actuaries at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has lowered its forecast of medical spending in 2016 by 1 percentage point of GDP. In dollar terms, this is $2,500 for a family of four.”

To see why this is wrong, it is useful to break down this paragraph’s thesis into its component parts. Specifically, it claims that:

The President’s previous assertions that his “health-care reform plan” would “save $2,500 per family” have been “shown” “to be right,” and that;

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