House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on Thursday that health insurance premiums will go up under Obamacare because people who did not buy insurance before, and thus had no premium at all, will now be forced to buy insurance.
She also urged people to be “optimistic” about Obamacare.
“You just see,” Pelosi said. “I mean be optimistic about it. It is a very, very exciting enterprise.”
“I don’t remember saying that everybody in the country would have a lower premium, because everybody in the country doesn’t have health insurance,” Pelosi continued. “So how could it be lower? But the fact is, the value of what you get for the cost that you pay is a reduction in cost to you.”
“But for everybody it is going to be, again, a liberation, a freedom,” she said, adding that under Obamacare young people could pursue careers as writers or photographers.
A report released last month by the House Energy and Commerce Committee warnedthat health insurance premiums will grow an average of 100 percent under Obamacare, and that some will soar more than 400 percent. The findings were based on internal documents provided by 17 health insurance companies, including Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Foundation.
In Pelosi’s California, individual-market premiums could rise by as much as 146 percent, according to a report.
President Barack Obama promised in 2008 that his health care plan would “bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family.”
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