By Allysia Finely
“We’ve gotten to a point where healthcare is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations,” CBS News medical contributor Céline Gounder said during a Friday segment on the roasting of health insurers…
Grant Democrats this: The law has advanced their political goal of expanding government control over insurers, in return for lavishing Americans with subsidies to buy overpriced, lousy products…
At the same time, ObamaCare’s perverse effects are fueling public rage against insurers and support for a single-payer system that would eliminate them. Mr. Obama and Peter Orszag, the law’s chief architect, must be smiling. Mr. Orszag, now CEO of the financial-services firm Lazard, has dined out on advising health insurers on mergers he says were spurred by the law’s regulations. How convenient.
The U.S. is spending $2 trillion more on healthcare than in 2010. Yet Americans aren’t healthier, as a new paper by the Paragon Health Institute observes. Mortality rates for 25- to 64-year-olds from major medical causes, such as hypertensive diseases, diabetes and neurologic conditions, climbed between 2009 and 2019…
ObamaCare requires plans to cover myriad government-determined “essential benefits” regardless of whether people need them. It also prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums based on a patient’s health-risk factors and limits their ability to do so for older people. The young and healthy are thus required to subsidize their elders, while taxpayers are required to subsidize everyone on the exchanges.
If the goal were to help Americans with costly health conditions, it would have been far simpler and less expensive to boost subsidies for state high-risk pools. But that wouldn’t have accomplished Democrats’ actual goal, which is to turn insurers into de facto public utilities and jerry-rig a halfway house to single-payer healthcare. What a con.”
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