President Obama couldn’t have been more emphatic. Critics of the Affordable Care Act were predicting it would encourage employers to stop offering health insurance to their workers, forcing them to find new, and possibly more costly, coverage on the Obamacare exchanges. The president had long scoffed at such predictions, and at a White House news conference last April, he sought to put the idea to rest once and for all.

“For the average American out there, for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, this thing has already happened,” he said of Obamacare. “And their only impact is that their insurance is stronger, better, more secure than it was before. Full stop. That’s it. They don’t have to worry about anything else.”