AP Fact Check: Obamacare not in ‘death spiral’

By ERICA WERNER

AP Congressional Correspondent

WASHINGTON

President-elect Donald Trump says that President Barack Obama’s health care law “will fall of its own weight.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan says the law is “in what the actuaries call a death spiral.”

And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says that “by nearly any measure, Obamacare has failed.”

The problem with all these claims: They are exaggerated, if not downright false.

Democrats, too, are guilty of rhetorical excesses around the health care law, often claiming that it’s working as intended while downplaying its flaws.

But with Republicans in the majority and driving the agenda, here’s a look at some of the GOP claims about the law, and how they compare with the facts:

TRUMP, RYAN AND MCCONNELL: The law will “fall of its own weight,” is in a “death spiral” and “has failed.”

THE FACTS: Experts agree that the law is not currently in a “death spiral,” an actuarial term that refers to a vicious cycle when rising insurance costs force healthy customers out of the marketplace, resulting in still higher prices, which cause even more customers to bail, etc., until the system collapses.

But some say that if the current situation continues, that is a likely or possible scenario. Health care premiums are jumping by double digits this year, and the health care marketplaces created by the law are short on the healthy consumers who make insurance companies profitable.

“It’s not a failure in that 20 million people or more have insurance that didn’t used to have insurance. Everything else, it’s too early to judge,” said economist Gail Wilensky, who ran Medicare under former President George H.W. Bush.

RYAN: “You cannot fix a fundamentally broken law; you’ve got to replace it.”

THE FACTS: Experts agree that Congress could fix the law’s problems, should it choose. Indeed many argue that some of the law’s problems can be traced to the decision by Obama and Democrats to push it through on a partisan basis – alienating Republicans who have refused ever since to participate in any attempt to tweak the law to improve it, as would be necessary with any program of such size and complexity.

MCCONNELL: Obamacare “didn’t lower costs, it didn’t increase choice.”

THE FACTS: McConnell’s comments are true in part.

The first five years of Obama’s presidency saw historically slow growth in U.S. health care spending, though experts differ on whether the law had anything to do with that. Some credit the global recession.

Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.