Political Quotes

“I appreciate my friend's question and I will be quick in the answer because I know we are running short on time. I actually asked the CBO Director a question very similar to the one the Senator from Wyoming proposes. I said: Explain to me why your report actually says the Affordable Care Act is going to cost 10 percent less than you originally estimated and explain to me why the insurance subsidies are going to cost 20 percent less than you originally estimated. His answer was very clear: It is because premiums have come in lower than CBO initially estimated. In fact, this year, Kaiser reviewed premiums within these exchanges all across the country and said the average premium increase from last year to this year is 1 percent all across the country. In Connecticut, our biggest insurer increased their premiums by 1 percent. One of the other offerers on the exchange decreased their premiums by 10 percent. The reason the Affordable Care Act is costing much less today is because our actual experience--not our estimated experience into the future--is that premiums are being stabilized in large part because of the reforms in this act. So if we want to talk about actual experience--what is happening on the ground today--it is that we are seeing premiums coming in almost exactly where they were last year, this year, in comparison to 5 years ago and 10 years ago when we were seeing double-digit increases in premiums from year to year.…”