Before Obamacare, insurance premiums on the individual market were rising by about 10 percent a year. But, it’s important to note, the cost of any given person’s health plan purchased this way depended on how sick they were. Insurance companies could charge people more if they had cancer, for example, or deny them coverage entirely. Insurers were partly able to keep costs down just by keeping sick people off their plans. Under Obamacare, insurers can’t do that anymore.

In 2014, right after most of the Affordable Care Act sprang into action, a middle-of-the-road plan—the “second-lowest cost silver-level” plan—was between 10 and 21 percent cheaper than a similar plan was before the ACA in 2013. So concluded an analysis published in Health Affairs in July by the economists Loren Adler and Paul Ginsburg, two health-care experts at the Brookings Institution.

Since then, the price of individual-market plans has climbed higher. Health-care prices go up all the time, no matter what. We all wish they didn’t; they do anyway. But in the years since the ACA was implemented, individual-market premiums haven’t been rising as fast as they were before, according to Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They went up by “35 to 40 percent in the three years before ACA,” Gruber told me. “If you look at the three years since ACA, it’s still below that, including this year.”

Premiums Before and After Obamacare

The “including this year” part is important. News of soaring Obamacare premiums—they went up 22 percent this year—was everywhere right before the election. But according to Adler and Ginsburg’s projections, premiums are still lower this year than they would have been without the ACA, given how premiums were rising before the law. “People are getting more for less under the ACA,” they wrote.

Not everyone agrees with this analysis. Some conservative health wonks, such as the Hudson Institute’s Jeffrey Anderson, have disputed Ginsburg and Adler’s paper, arguing premiums are higher now than they would have been without Obamacare and pointing to yet another Brookings study supposedly proving that point. (Adler responded that the two studies use different sets of data. “Both studies are well done and valuable, just all of our analyses have their inevitable shortcomings,” he said.)

Either way, it’s clear that Obamacare is too expensive for some people, especially if they’re not qualified for the subsidies for low- and middle-income people who purchase insurance on the exchanges. People are now spending larger shares of their income on health care than before Obamacare, but that’s not because of the law—it’s because health-care costs are growing faster than incomes.