Insurance Industry: Obama's "Fix" Is Entirely Unworkable

Earlier I wrote:

* Are insurers even interested in offering these policies given the other strictures of Obamacare? Bear in mind, they cannot charge the healthy any less than the desperately sick. So they, like Obama, need healthier people in these high-risk pools. (Obamacare essentially puts the entire country into a high-risk pool.)

So the insurance companies can offer these policies again... and the effect, I'm pretty sure, will be to drastically increase their own downside risk when they insure the uninsurable, and have fewer healthier people to tax to pay for the uninsurable.

So Obama may be certainly is attempting to engineer a situation in which he offers an odious, destructive deal to insurance companies, so that when they balk, he can say, "See? This is why we need Obamacare, and none of this is my fault."

Chris Wallace read this statement from the trade association of American insurance companies:

Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law, Obamacare, could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers. Premiums have already been set for next year, based on assumptions of when consumers will be transitioning to the marketplaces.

If now fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase health coverage in the exchanges, premiums will increase, and there will be fewer choices for consumers.

They're talking about the Death Spiral.

The female anchor asked Wallace if Obama had consulted with the insurance agency. Chris Wallace scoffed, laughed at the question, asking her in return: At this late date, why would he start consulting?

"This Is A New Insanity:" So says a spokesman for New Jersey Health Insurance Underwriters.

Fuller statement from American Health Insurance Providers below.

posted by Ace at 01:22 PM

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