Cell Phone Cost vs Obamacare Premium

President Obama claimed this week in a Funny or Die "Between Two Ferns" video that young people can get Obamacare coverage "for what it costs you to pay your cell phone bill."

But Giuseppe Macri @ Daily Caller found that Obamacare coverage was at least twice as costly as cell phone service:

For comparison’s sake, we’ll define an average middle-of-the-road plan as consisting of a smartphone, two-year upgrade, unlimited calls, unlimited texts and an average of two gigs of downloadable Internet data per month.

Discounting taxes nationwide, that plan costs about $90 on Verizon, $80 on AT&T, $70 on Sprint, and $60 on T-Mobile every month. Both Sprint and T-Mobile offer the same plans with unlimited monthly data for $80. All pricing is relevant as of January 2014.

Of the Affordable Care Act’s “bronze,” “silver” and “gold” coverage plans offered on the Washington, D.C. health insurance exchange marketplace, the cheapest middle-of-the-road equivalent silver plan is $181.01 per month, after subsidies, for the lowest age bracket, which covers 27-year-olds and under that make about $25,000 annually. Silver plans must cover 70 percent of all medical costs, according to the law.

For the same age group in Pennsylvania, which is one of the 10 cheapest states in which to purchase health insurance on the federal exchange run in 36 states, a silver plan with the same coverage still costs $145 per month. A similar plan under Covered California, the largest state-run exchange with the highest number of enrollees, costs an average of $175. California had the highest number of uninsured Americans nationwide prior to the implementation of the law last October.

Altogether, that makes the average monthly cost of health care for young people under the Affordable Care Act a little more than twice as expensive as the average cellphone bill.