Here’s a summary: Obamacare's imposed "Community Rating" will drive premiums up for the young and healthy (see the IBD article for more detail). The value in having health insurance for this key demographic erodes as costs leap ahead yet quality (at best) stays the same. Paying the penalty to forego insurance becomes an attractive alternative, the young and healthy opt out of enrolling in insurance plans. The old and sick need the premiums paid by the young and healthy to cover their care. With enrollment dropping, premiums must rise to compensate for the smaller number of participants. And the cycle repeats, each time driving costs higher and driving people on the margins out.
The system put in place with the “Affordable Care Act” (a laughable name by any measure) appears so inept, so obviously fraught with error that one is forced to ask “how could anyone be so daft to enact this policy?” Daft like a fox.
I’m certainly not the first to suggest what follows, but I’d like to go on record. I want to take what was once my benign fear and make it a public display of desperation. After reading the IBD piece it seems painfully obvious: the system was designed to fail. “Obamacare” was happily sent on an unsustainable trajectory not out of stupidity, but intentionally to tear down any remnant of private enterprise in healthcare.
When the left had full control of the Federal Government, a radical change from pseudo-private healthcare prior to a single-payer, government controlled system was still a bridge too far. But the manifest failures from a system doomed to fall apart could very well provide the impetus to move to a fully state controlled system. (Note: I say “pseudo-private” under the assumption that we haven’t had a free market in healthcare in decades; if you believe otherwise, I respectfully conclude you are kidding yourself or have no concept of real economics).
Political history is replete with examples of the Federal Government making wild miscalculations and promoting unsustainable policies only to come along with a grander (and more horrible) solution. The response tend to be more burdensome for the taxpayer and all the more taxing on individual liberty. For example, the recent financial crisis is a case study in this downward spiral. Bad regulations, weak enforcement, and ill-conceived mandates for lenders contributed to the mortgage crisis in 2007-08. The response? A miserable piece of regulatory overkill now known as Dodd-Frank. A real problem in mortgage lending just got a prescription worse than the symptoms.
The question isn’t if we will replace the “Affordable Care Act”, but when and what will supplant it. My nagging fear is that the blame for its failure will be placed at the feet of private enterprise. And if that battlefield of public opinion is lost, I hope the grand new healthcare solution covers unorthodox back problems. Because you’ll have to bend in an awfully unnatural way to kiss your ass good-bye.
