{"id":568730,"date":"2010-05-18T12:12:45","date_gmt":"2010-05-18T16:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"tag:theatlantic.com,2010-05-18:mt-56898"},"modified":"2010-05-18T12:12:45","modified_gmt":"2010-05-18T16:12:45","slug":"health-insurers-and-their-faustian-bargain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/568730","title":{"rendered":"Health Insurers and Their Faustian Bargain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Hsieh, a doctor, argues that insurers have made a Faustian bargain<\/a>. They supported ObamaCare in order to get more customers, and now they’re finding that once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane: <\/p>\n

\n
When South Dakota and Kentucky passed similar “guaranteed coverage” and price control laws several years ago, many insurers <\/font>left these states<\/font><\/a>
\nrather than slowly be bled to death. Implemented nationally, ObamaCare
\ncould drive many insurers out of business altogether. In essence,
\nprivate insurers would survive only at the arbitrary pleasure of the
\ngovernment. And the bureaucrats’ whims can be arbitrary indeed.<\/font><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

When insurers recently pointed out that ObamaCare did not actually require them to immediately <\/font>offer coverage<\/font><\/a>
\nfor certain children with preexisting conditions, Secretary of Health
\nand Human Services Kathleen Sebelius immediately threatened to <\/font>issue regulations<\/font><\/a> forcing them to do so — regardless of the actual letter of the law.<\/font><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

And Congress is now seeking to expand the newly-passed ObamaCare legislation to give <\/font>federal regulators<\/font><\/a> the same power as Massachusetts state regulators to veto proposed insurance rate increases<\/a> unless federal officials considered them “reasonable.”<\/font><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

ObamaCare
\nthus places a noose around private insurers’ necks. Insurance companies
\nwill be required to offer numerous benefits determined by politicians
\nand lobbyists. But they will be allowed to charge only what government
\nbureaucrats permit. No business can survive long if it must offer
\n$2,000 worth of services to customers but can charge only $1,000.<\/font><\/div>\n

Although
\nit is tempting to take delight at the insurance industry’s self-caused
\nplight, the inevitable collapse of the private insurance market would
\nalso leave millions of Americans without coverage. Even though this
\ncrisis would be caused by government policies, liberals would gleefully
\nportray it as a “failure of the free market” and demand that the
\ngovernment “rescue” health care.<\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n


The problem is that Obamacare promised too much:  universal coverage, and<\/i> no rationing, and<\/i> lower costs.  Now government is left mandating the impossible (and no, Europe hasn’t found some magic way to do this–David Cutler, one of Obama’s former advisors on healthcare, told me in an interview a few months back that “they all ration”.)  But eventually we’re going to have to actually make a choice, not merely command companies to some how make this mess work.
<\/font>

\n

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Paul Hsieh, a doctor, argues that insurers have made a Faustian bargain. They supported ObamaCare in order to get more customers, and now they’re finding that once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane: When South Dakota and Kentucky passed similar “guaranteed coverage” and price control laws several years ago, many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-568730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}