Shaheen: Costs Have Gone Up Under ACA, But It’s Designed to Cover More People and Congress Hasn’t Spent Enough to Keep Costs Down

On Thursday’s broadcast of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) responded to a question on whether subsidies have to keep being increased for the Affordable Care Act because it didn’t lower costs by saying that costs have gone up under the ACA, “But the important thing about Obamacare and the marketplace is that we have covered more people,” “and that’s what the marketplace, the Obamacare marketplace, is designed to do. Now, one of the challenges is that Congress has continued to take away the funding that was designed to help lower those costs over time, so that we haven’t been able to do the work that we need to on the delivery system reform to make the system work better.”

Co-host Steve Inskeep asked, “First, you point out that the rest of us pay for the health care of p