Holman Jenkins, from today's WSJ:
Now, Can We Have Health-Care Reform?
ObamaCare doubles down on a failing system.
"A certain kind of person—we get emails from them all the time—understands exactly nothing about the health-care debate, but thinks they know who the villain is: the insurance industry.
"Barack Obama is not one of them. In the desperate hours he played to public ignorance. But from the beginning, the industry was his ally because he set out to solve its biggest problem—which is not the same as America's biggest problem.
"We'll let Angela Braly, CEO of insurer WellPoint, take the story from here. She was recently hauled before Congress to justify her company's proposed 39% rate hike in California. She explained the source was two-fold: rising medical costs and healthier customers dropping their coverage, forcing the sick to pick up the tab.
"Now this sounds like two problems, but for WellPoint and other insurers it's really only one problem. Once everyone is required by government mandate to buy insurance, the industry's survival is no longer threatened: It can just pass its skyrocketing costs along to customers. Once customers can no longer refuse to buy the industry's product, the problem of costs won't be fixed, but it no longer is the insurance industry's problem.
. . .
"For insurers, the check is in the mail: So watered down is the individual mandate that it must accelerate the industry's death spiral if not for the massive subsidies the government now has obliged itself to provide to keep the industry afloat and allow insurers to continue scalping their 15% off the top for serving as gatekeeper to a tax loophole.
"When all is said and done, with unerring accuracy, ObamaCare has ended up doubling down on the system's existing perversities. . ."
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More at the link, including about the market distortions from the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance that are a big part of the problem, but no part of the present 'solution.' |
