Fact-check: Rx needed for Roskam portrayal of foe’s health care stand
In a current Facebook ad, U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam accuses his Democratic challenger of supporting “disastrous health care policies for your family,” among them “doubling premiums” and “cutting current health care plans.”
It’s no surprise that Roskam, a six-term Republican incumbent fighting to keep his 6th District seat in the western suburbs, doesn’t see eye-to-eye on health care with Sean Casten, a clean-energy entrepreneur from Downers Grove.
Roskam was an architect of last year’s congressional tax overhaul that also weakened Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act. Casten has made protecting and expanding health care access under Obamacare a top priority of his campaign.
Republicans have been complaining about the effects of Obamacare for years, but Roskam is taking wild swings with this attack on Casten.
‘Doubling premiums’
Veronica Vera, a Roskam spokeswoman, said the ad connects the dots between Casten’s support for Obamacare and a federal report — filled with caveats — that found premiums sold to individuals on the federal health care exchange had doubled by 2017 from what they had averaged before the program’s launch in 2014.
If it happened in the past, it surely will happen in the future, Vera reasoned, and so to the Roskam campaign that means Casten backs a doubling of premiums.
But the Roskam campaign could provide no evidence that Casten had ever said such a thing. What’s more, experts say a major factor behind recent premium spikes on the exchange was uncertainty over the law’s future given frequent attempts by Roskam and other Republicans, including President Donald Trump, to kill Obamacare.
Even so, there is evidence in Illinois that the days of Obamacare sticker shock may be over. Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the state’s largest insurer, has proposed a slight reduction in its Obamacare plan premiums for next year.
It’s also important to note that most Americans obtain insurance through their employers, not Obamacare. Overall, premium hikes for work-based policies have been modest in recent years.
For those who do rely on Obamacare, just a small share have been exposed to the full brunt of past Obamacare premium increases. In 2017, of the 15.2 million Americans purchasing Obamacare coverage through the federal health care exchange, 8.2 million qualified for federal subsidies that cushioned increases, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading authority on health care.
Another 5.4 million Americans also purchased full-price individual insurance through plans that existed prior to Obamacare, according to Kaiser.
“We’re really talking about maybe 2 percent of the population that’s paying full-price premiums for the individual market overall,” said Cynthia Cox, a health reform and private
insurance expert with the Kaiser Foundation.
‘Cutting current health care plans’
Roskam’s other attack also suffers from convoluted logic: Obamacare shoppers had fewer options when picking plans for 2018, so that must mean more is actually less if Obamacare were expanded as Casten wants. “Expanding the ACA would mean limiting health care options for everyone affected,” Vera wrote.
The argument has holes. Obamacare plans didn’t exist prior to 2014, so even pared-back options are still a plus. A key reason for the reductions was uncertainty over the law’s future following the election of Trump.
And Obamacare also mandates minimum levels of coverage that previously did not exist. The health care law vastly expanded access to coverage for millions of Americans who previously lacked it, including those who didn’t qualify based on their health. “Before the ACA, if you had a pre-existing condition, there could be any number of plans to choose from, but you couldn’t get any of them,” Cox said.
Our ruling
Health care policy has more wrinkles than a Shar Pei dog, and the complexity makes it easy for partisans to demagogue.
Roskam’s ad provides no support for his claims about Casten’s positions while also blaming Obamacare support for past price pressures caused, at least in part, by Republican attempts to weaken or kill the health law.
That’s not just wrong, it’s absurd. We rate it Pants on Fire!
The Better Government Association runs PolitiFact Illinois, the local arm of the nationally renowned, Pulitzer Prize-winning factchecking enterprise that rates the truthfulness of statements made by governmental leaders and politicians. Ahead of the historic 2018 elections, BGA’s fact-checking service is teaming up weekly with the Sun-Times, in print and online. You can find all of the PolitiFact Illinois stories we’ve reported together here.