Rising Costs: How often did the president promise the Democrats’ health care reform would bend the spending curve downward? Now the media that’ve coddled him for years are finally talking about ObamaCare’s costs.

The media that endorsed ObamaCare as a cost-control watershed are now beginning to actually report on its effects. Over the weekend, the New York Times noted that “health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.”

On Saturday, the Oregonian reported that Oregon residents who buy their own health insurance “face major cost changes.”

“The coverage cost shake-up for those purchasing their own coverage is just one of many major changes to the health care landscape rolling out this year courtesy of the Affordable Care Act,” the newspaper said.

A day later, Washington Post blogger Sarah Kliff noted that the “Affordable Care Act has contributed to the rise in premiums, especially in the individual market,” because of the mandates it has placed on health insurance carriers.

“One thing the Affordable Care Act did right away was make health insurance benefit packages more robust,” the blog added. “It required insurance companies to cover preventive care at no cost, for example, and allowed parents to keep their kids on their plans up to age 26.”

Then there is The Hill reporting Monday on a study that predicts ObamaCare’s “age rating restrictions could mean a 42% hike in premium costs for people aged 21 to 29 when they buy individual coverage.”

Where was this reporting when the media were demanding that Washington do something about the uninsured, when ABC’s Diane Sawyer praised then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ObamaCare push as “an epic blend of persuasion, muscle and will,” or when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell told Rep. Elijah Cummings that the Democrats had to get President Obama a win on health care reform for his “sense of his power, for his legacy”?

Just as the media have ignored Obama’s chronic foreign policy stumbles and his nearly criminal stewardship of the economy, it also neglected to report on the deep pitfalls that ObamaCare would dig.

But now that ObamaCare has become law and has been held up by the courts, and Obama himself has been re-elected, the media have been freed to report on the issues they should have already covered in painstaking depth.

Obama and the Democrats who schemed the Affordable Care Act and rammed it through Congress won’t be held accountable, though. Somehow, the Republicans will be found culpable for any cost increases.

Published on Investors.com January 7, 2013.

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