What Dr. Chicago scoffed at and dishonestly downplayed a month ago....
At a July town hall in Nashville, Tennessee, Barack Obama played down fears of a spike in health insurance premiums in his signature health law’s third year.
“My expectation is that they’ll come in significantly lower than what’s being requested,” he said, saying Tennesseans had to work to ensure the State’s insurance commissioner “does their job in not just passively reviewing the rates, but really asking, ‘OK, what is it that you are looking for here? Why would you need very high premiums?’”
....is now a reality. Which once again illustrates that O is far more full of crap than he is any kind of soothsayer:
That commissioner, Julie Mix McPeak, answered on Friday by greenlighting the full 36.3% increase sought by the biggest health plan in the State, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. She said the insurer demonstrated the hefty increase for 2016 was needed to cover higher-than-expected claims from sick people who signed up for individual policies in the first two years of the [Una]ffordable Care Act.
Several regulators around the country agree with her, and have approved all or most of the big premium increases sought by the largest health plans in their States for the new sign-up season that begins November 1st. [emphases added]
"Higher than expected" to whom? Anybody with a college freshman-level understanding of economics would have expected skyrocketing premium rates when demand explodes and supply contracts under the "lower than expected" signup rates of the young adult population that has, belatedly recognizing that they're the bag-holding suckers in this equation, largely opted to pay the more "affordable"
It's not the carriers' fault for requesting the increases, because that's what it will take to keep them in the individual health insurance market. It's also not the States' fault for approving the increases, because the carriers showed them the ObamaCare facts-of-life numbers. It's Barack Obama's fault for sending the individual health insurance market into this death spiral in the first place - by design.
About the only saving grace most Americans have is that employer-provided plans have not yet been directly affected - and that was via an illegal, unconstitutional deferral of the illegal, unconstitutional employer mandate. That's the only reason I and my family haven't fallen into Medicaid squalor. When the EM kicks in (probably not until after either the 2016 election or Obama's coup de tat), the same hammer blow of perverse, market-destroying incentives will impact the employer-plan side, and the transition to Universal Medicaid will go into maximum overdrive no matter which party wins next year's election-that-might-never-happen. "Exploiting a crisis" and all that.
If you're looking for a reason why the GOP seems less and less eager to repeal ObamaCare itself other than "RINO!!!!!!!!!!", there you go. In short, it cannot be done, either politically or practically. It's just one more Obama-imposed Rubicon that has been passed as a result of The One's re-election.
Imagine what he'll be able to do in his third term.
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