The Lie at the Heart of Obamacare

President Obama and congressional Democrats have been claiming with straight faces that their health care "reform" plan would merely add a public insurance option to the existing array of private health insurance programs merely to introduce more "competition" into the system. (Get it? The only problem with health insurance is that it lacks enough insurance providers to promote competition, which is why the government will add one more). These officials have laughed off critics of the legislation who have been warning that the public option is designed to kill off private insurance and pave the way for a single-payer system.

With the release on Tuesday of the House Democrats' actual legislation (over 1000 pages) to radicalize the U.S. health industry, critics seem to have discovered that not only were they correct about the crowding out of the private sector, but that it will happen sooner than anyone imagined. The bill states expressly that effective on the first day of the year following the bill's passage (i.e., January 1st, 2010), individual health insurance issuers may not offer coverage to any individual unless the insurer belongs to a newly-established "Health Care Exchange." And the Health Care Exchange is nothing but a body of new regulations and restrictions on insurers that obviously will result in vastly higher costs which must be passed on to consumers via higher premiums.

According to Wednesday's Investors Business Daily editorial:

From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington's coverage.

The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, "fizzle out altogether."

What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.

SO Congress's plan for reducing the cost of health care (as if that was their intent) is to increase the cost of health premiums for those of us who want to buy it from a private insurer. Since the public option plan will not be forced by competitive pressure to raise its premiums, millions will flock to it, eventually drying up the market for private plans.

As the IDB editorial said: "The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny."

The question is, once everyone is forced into the public option (everyone except union workers and the corrupt bastards in Congress), what will prevent the government from jacking up the premiums on everyone once they figure out that like Social Security and Medicare, the costs of nationalized health care are unmanageable?

Nothing. When that happens we will have lousy health care without even the satisfaction of paying less for it. Maybe if its lousy enough even Mexicans won't want to live here anymore.