Trump says Obamacare is 'collapsing.' Here's what he's getting wrong

WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump, as he has repeatedly in the past, claimed Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act is a disaster.

"Obamacare is collapsing, and we must act decisively to protect all Americans," he said during his address to a joint session of Congress.

This is a major exaggeration.

Health insurance premiums on marketplaces created by the law did increase markedly this year in many parts of the country as insurers dealt with higher-than-expected medical claims from patients.

But most consumers are still able to get health plans for less than $100 a month on the marketplaces, thanks to insurance subsidies made available by Obamacare.

More broadly, Trump's attacks miss a much larger part of the Obamacare story.

Marketplaces represent a fraction of the overall system, providing coverage to only about 11 million people, most of whom cannot get coverage through an employer or other government program.

By comparison, more than 150 million Americans get health coverage through an employer. Another 55 million elderly and disabled Americans get coverage through the federal Medicare program.

Health care costs in both the employer market and in Medicare have been rising at historically low levels since the enactment of the 2010 health law.

In 2016, for example, the annual family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose an average of just 3 percent, according to an annual survey by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust.

And since 2011, premiums have risen 20 percent, far lower than in the previous five years, when premiums jumped 31 percent, and even lower than in the five years between 2001 and 2006, when they shot up 63 percent.

Medicare has seen a similar slowdown, as the cost per enrollee has grown by an average of just 1.4 percent annually since 2011, according to the last report by the program's trustees.

That was the lowest growth rate in Medicare's history, dating to 1965.

Meanwhile, the laws' coverage expansion has helped more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans get health coverage.

And new research shows the law is dramatically improving poor patients' access to medical care, particularly in states that have used the law to expand their Medicaid safety net.

At the same time, contrary to charges from Trump and other Republicans, there is little evidence that Obamacare is destroying jobs.

In fact, the private sector has added jobs every month since President Barack Obama signed the law in March 2010, a stark reversal from the months before the law was enacted when the economy was hemorrhaging jobs amid the recession.