What do UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Aetna, and Blue Cross Blue Shield have in common? Each has found that taxpayer subsidies that Obamacare offers do not cover the costs of pre-existing conditions that participating insures are required to cover, writes the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon. Even raising premiums by 86%, as Aetna found out, does not do the trick. It’s still not enough.
Mr. Cannon exposes the healthcare disaster that is now unfolding in Pinal County, Arizona, where “only higher-income residents, who are likely to be in better health, can afford Obamacare’s unsubsidized premiums.”
In 2009, President Obama promised that under Obamacare, “it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition” or “to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most” or “to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime.” Obamacare would place a “limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses” and require insurers “to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies.”
Every one of President Obama promises is a lie. “Not one word is true,” Mr. Cannon informs readers.
A big irony here is that, in 2009, private-insurance markets were starting to introduce new products that protected those with pre-existing conditions from exorbitant premiums. “When Congress passed Obamacare, it destroyed those innovations.”
Only the federal government could come up with a market so unappealing that it is borderline unsustainable, writes NRO’s Rich Lowry. “(T)he Obama administration and its allies were too transfixed with ‘making history.’ And so they did — by passing an Affordable Care Act that is one of the great misnomers in the history of major American legislation.”
