There's utterly nothing newsworthy about yet another massive ObamaCare premium hike, and I probably wouldn't even be bothering with it if not for the hilarious fact of the White House's incredulous assurances last week that UHC's quitting the O-Care cartels after this year would have "no effect" on health insurance rates:
Health insurance companies are laying the groundwork for substantial increases in ObamaCare premiums, opening up a line of attack for Republicans in a presidential election year.
Many insurers have been losing money on the ObamaCare [cartel]s, in part because they set their premiums too low when the plans started in 2014. The companies are now expected to seek substantial price increases.
“There are absolutely some carriers that are going to have to come in with some pretty significant price hikes to make up for the underpricing that they did before,” said Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, while noting that the final picture remains unclear.
.... But....
The proposals for premium increases, which will be rolled out over the next couple of months, still have to be approved by State insurance commissioners. The ultimate impact on consumers will be hard to determine, as ObamaCare’s tax credits often soften the blow.
Not as often, or as much, as the White House wants us to believe - which just gooses ObamaCare costs and budget deficits in any case, in contravention of another promise of the program's inherent fraud. And if insurance carriers don't get the huge premium (and deductible) hikes they need to stay in business, a lot more will follow UHC out the cartel door:
The Associated Press notes that some other big insurance players, such as Aetna, have reported heavy losses from the [U]CA exchanges, and are expected to “trim their exchange participation in 2017.”
“A dozen nonprofit health insurance cooperatives created by the [U]CA to sell coverage on the [cartel]s have already folded, and the survivors all lost millions last year,” the AP adds.
The Hill relates Obama administration efforts to spin the UnitedHealth disaster by arguing that despite its status as the nation’s largest insurance provider, and its expansion to thirty-four States, it was a “fairly small player on the ObamaCare [cartel]s.”
However, the Hill acknowledged that some of the much larger players, including Blue Cross/Blue Shield, “have also raised the prospect of dropping off the [cartel]s.”
Some of these providers have made it clear that only substantial premium increases – which taxpayers will be looted without mercy to subsidize, so ObamaCare enrollees don’t panic and drop their coverage – will keep them in the program.
And if States don't grant those increases, the carriers walk out, O-Care policies are canceled, and the policyholders (i.e. enforced suckers) are screwed. Death spiral, complete. Or, in other words, "universal affordable coverage".
But don't worry, my fellow Americans, the Regime has an(other) unlawful, illegal, unconstitutional, despotic rabbit to pull out of its collectivist hat:
The AP also reports that the administration is planning to rewrite the [Una]ffordable Care Act yet again, presumably through regulatory fiat or executive orders, to make it harder for customers to “sign up for coverage outside regular enrollment windows and then dump expensive claims on their books.” UnitedHealth evidently didn’t want to stay in the game for another year to see how that new adventure in hyper-regulation worked out.
In other words, the Obama Regime is going to deny coverage to the Americans who most need it and can least afford it in order to....control costs, in order to keep the insurance carriers in the cartels, in order to keep ObamaCare from collapsing before it can collapse the private health insurance market.
Betcha they're not going to spin this "taking away your health care" in anywhere near that honest a fashion. In fact, they're not going to spin it at all, because it is unspinnable. They'll just continue to hilariously assure everybody that the premium hikes "won't be that bad" even though there were supposed to be premium decreases, and that the wildly erratic and inaccurate (and illegal) federal subsidies will cover them, all in the White House's trademark Chip Diller-esque fashion....
....when, in reality....
....the whole corrupt, statist mess is circling the fiscal/economic drain. The only variables are how fast and how soon.
Just as the Architect intended.
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