Michael Tanner of National Review Online points out some of the awesome positives we see with Glorious Obamacare!
Obamacare generates piles of relative surplus value without requiring any innovation.
Already we’ve seen requests for increases for individual plans as high as 64.8 percent in Texas, 61 percent in Pennsylvania, 51.6 percent in New Mexico, 36.3 percent in Tennessee, 30.4 percent in Maryland, 25 percent in Oregon, and 19.9 percent in Washington. Those increases would come on top of premium increases last year that were 24.4 percent above what they would have been without Obamacare, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
This is, admittedly mitigated by the sort of economic competition that Obamacare sought to eliminate. Hospitals, ambulance providers and physicians have all sought out ways of carving this surplus away from the insurance companies. Numerous other parasites have latched on to the insurance companies for their share of the bounty. Karl Denninger describes the process below.
Pull out your car insurance bill and the declarations page. You will find a line there called “Medical Payments” (it may be called “PIP” or similar in some states) which is state-mandated coverage. The price of that coverage is five times what it should be and for drivers with lower liability limits it’s frequently the most expensive part of their policy. In addition, your Bodily Injury coverage cost is jacked, typically by at least twice, due to this same racket. It doesn’t end with auto insurance either; Workman’s Compensation, which is required of businesses once they hire their first employee, is also a multiple of real cost for the same reason and this reflects back into the price of everything you buy from a hamburger to a gallon of gasoline.
Obamacare limits the extent to which insurance companies are ever made to pay back out.
At the same time, deductibles for the cheapest Obamacare plans now average about $5,180 for individuals and $10,500 for families.
Obamacare eliminates policies from the market that compete against the overpriced, shoddy plans insurers make the most money off of offering.
The ACA sets minimum standards for what a plan has to include. What this does is effectively shut competition out of the market. It forces people who would not pay into the racket to pay into it or get fined for not being insured. It makes people buy far more insurance than they need to subsidize other customers that can’t afford the benevolent care they receive from the Unaffordable Care Act. It becomes a wealth transfer vehicle that taxes the young and healthy for as long as they are crazy enough to remain young and healthy.
So The Unaffordable Care Act works like Hell. It robs the bank without exposing the perpetrators to hostile gunfire from the security firm. It works the way Billy Tauzin, Kaiser Permanente and numerous other healthcare industry apparatchiks wrote it to work. Thus, it comes as no surprise they find the potential outcome of King v. Burwell so potentially unpleasant.
Regulating the USG the way our healthcare industry does is all well and good, but it doesn’t do any good if a bribe proof, unaccountable entity shuts off their money reservoir. You can’t buy people who don’t have to run for office. They don’t work for you the way [mc_name name=’Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’M000355′ ] and Barack Obama willingly do. If these SCOTUS Justices decide to become do-gooders and break up the racket, it would mess up something that the politicians and the healthcare companies see as a beautiful thing. The American People are not so enamored, but two out of three isn’t bad. It wasn’t written for the people, so it’s silly to expect it to work for them. Which is fine, because it isn’t like the government works for the people anymore either. It’s not like they did all the hard work of writing themselves an Unaffordable Care Act.
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