Insurers Admit ObamaCare Is ‘Unsustainable’ Without Even More Rate Hikes
by John Hayward
15 Apr 2016
The biggest con job in American history lumbers forward, as insurance companies warn ObamaCare will collapse unless even more huge premium hikes are dropped on customers. As The Hill reports, even the Kaiser Family Foundation – which played a huge role in dumping this disaster on the American people – admits it:
Insurers say they are losing money on their ObamaCare plans at a rapid rate, and some have begun to talk about dropping out of the marketplaces altogether.
“Something has to give,” said Larry Levitt, an expert on the health law at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Either insurers will drop out or insurers will raise premiums.”
While analysts expect the market to stabilize once premiums rise and more young, healthy people sign up, some observers have not ruled out the possibility of a collapse of the market, known in insurance parlance as a “death spiral.”
Analysts “expect the market to stabilize once premiums rise and more young, healthy people sign up?” Analysts from where? Venezuela? Beijing? People do not voluntarily increase their purchases of a low-quality product because the price goes up. Only someone who speaks capitalism and freedom as a third or fourth language could deliver “analysis” like that.
Of course, this has nothing to do with capitalism, freedom, or voluntary action at all.
The Big, Big, Big Lie of ObamaCare – the lie of the century, delivered time and again by Barack Obama – was that ObamaCare would be an essentially voluntary program, consistent with the American ideals of free-market liberty. You remember: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. No one will take it away from you, period.” The essence of that transcendentally false statement was that participation in ObamaCare would be voluntary, and if you didn’t like it, why, you could keep your fine old low-cost, high-quality plan.
Obama was fond of bragging that people would not want to keep their old plans, because the Affordable Care Act plans would be superior in every way, most definitely including cost. He promised the average family would save $2500 per year with his plan.
Instead, the grim reality of ObamaCare described by The Hill is Blue Cross/Blue Shield announcing that ObamaCare customers have 22 percent higher medical costs than traditional insurance customers, insurance companies losing money on ObamaCare in forty-one states, and big insurance companies like UnitedHealth talking about getting out of the Affordable Care Act market entirely, unless they’re given permission to dramatically increase premiums.
Unstated in the article, but inevitable given the socialist mindset, is that healthy young people who don’t want to pay huge premiums for useless “insurance” with sky-high deductibles will be forced to buy those policies. They’ll be frog-marched into the system at gunpoint, by increasing the “individual mandate” penalty for failure to buy. As it stands, young people are basically forced to choose between buying Obama’s lousy insurance, or sacrificing their tax refunds ever year. The pain will be made worse, in order to increase compliance.
The Hill article is filled with quotes from industry insiders downplaying the risk of a “death spiral” with varying degrees of enthusiasm … provided insurance companies get to jack up those premiums.
Otherwise, as former CMS official Michael Adelberg put it, “Market exits are not out of the question if an insurer is looking at consecutive years of losses and regulators are unable to approve rates that get the insurer to break-even.”
Fewer providers, less competition, an insurance product of steadily reduced quality delivered for ever-higher prices to an increasingly disenchanted customer base … that all sounds rather like a “death spiral,” doesn’t it?
Of course, ObamaCare has one final flim-flam up its sleeve to conceal the true cost of this disastrous program: they’re going to hide some of the premium increases with tax subsidies.
“One factor helping to prevent a death spiral is ObamaCare’s tax credits, which cushion the impact of premium increases on consumers,” The Hill chirps.
No, they only hide the impact of premium increases, by forcing other people to pay for them. The whole scheme is a thinly-veiled raid on taxpayers, and it’s also breaking down the public’s resistance to single-payer socialized medicine, exactly as the fraudsters behind ObamaCare planned all along.
Once we have a huge population accustomed to sky-high insurance premiums partially paid by ObamaCare’s victims, plus immense out-of-pocket costs for every Obamacare enrollee, then progressives will schedule a political crisis and lunge for the complete government takeover of the health-care sector that they so desperately want.
The Hill makes a game effort to turn this all into a “Republicans pounce!” political story by concluding that “overall, while the system set up by ObamaCare itself might be resilient, premium increases are sure to fuel Republican arguments that the law simply isn’t working.”
ObamaCare’s failure is not a “Republican argument” – it’s a matter of objective fact. A system that can only survive with taxpayer subsidies is not “sustainable.”
ObamaCare is not healthy, it’s parasitic, and it’s not remotely functioning in accordance with the promises offered, or projections made, at its inception. That’s the definition of failure, and it is vitally important for the American people to become much more aggressive about terminating failed government programs, while ignoring the howls of protest from power-hungry Democrats and their crony-capitalist allies.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/...ate-hikes/
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