The way President Obama had it figured, the country would be singing his praises by now because Obamacare would have dramatically lowered health insurance premiums.
But as Julie Rovner reports for Kaiser Health News, Obama bureaucrats are trying to put the squeeze on state health insurance commissioners to reject the significant premium increases many health insurers are seeking: “Now the Obama administration is weighing in, asking state insurance regulators to take a closer look at rate requests before granting them. Under the Affordable Care Act, state agencies largely retain the right to regulate premiums in their states.”
True to form, Obama officials are claiming things are going great, but they wouldn’t be sending out the letter to commissioners if that were true. They are seeing the news stories and reports—and no doubt hearing from disgruntled Americans—that insurers are seeking significant premium increases, especially in the individual market (i.e., where people, rather than an employer, buy their own policy).
President Obama and the Democrats who foisted Obamacare on the country promised faithfully that the law would lower costs and control health care spending. Now that it is clear that health insurance premiums are rising quickly—and premiums rise because prices and spending are rising—Team Obama is unleashing its price control police.
Anyone who thinks health care prices and spending will go down when you expand health coverage to millions of uninsured, force insurers to cover many more procedures, and pump in hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars is a fool.
But it’s a pattern we’ve seen from political demagogues for ages. You’re probably familiar with the four phases: (1) Promise that the heavy hand of government will increase access and lower the costs of some important good or service; (2) when that doesn’t happen, begin the process of imposing price controls; (3) blame the “greedy capitalists” because the system isn’t working; and (4) when the price controls don’t work, set up a system of rationing or simply have the government take over the system to ensure it is run efficiently and, most important, “fairly.”
We have passed Phase 1 and are in the midst of Phase 2: beginning the process of imposing price controls—in this case, trying to get state insurance commissioners to lean on health insurers that are seeking significant premium increases.
Some states may be successful in ratcheting down some of the premium increases at first—just as Massachusetts did under Romneycare, where the exact same thing happened—but those premiums can only be squeezed so much for so long. At some point the insurers drop that coverage option, leaving thousands uninsured in their wake (you can see my story here).
The only thing standing in the way of liberals moving to Phase 4 is a Republican Congress, which wants to repeal Obamacare, not the laws of economics.
If Democrats were still in control of Congress—and they could be come 2017—they wouldn’t be satisfied with just asking state insurance commissioners to scrutinize premium-increase requests. They would be proposing legislation to impose price controls.
Otherwise, it would become clear to everyone that those who promised the Affordable Care Act would make health insurance more “affordable” had no idea what they were doing—which, of course, they didn’t.