Holman Jenkins explains how President Obama and Congress joined with the insurance industry to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
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.
There, in that one sentence, we give you the failure of ObamaCare, the failure of the congressional health-care debate, the failure of health-care politics in this country
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Under the law just signed, employers have even more incentive than they did yesterday to lavish excessive health insurance on their high-end employees. They have less incentive to cover low-end workers, or even hire them.