And it’s just the beginning:
The average price for the lowest-cost ObamaCare “bronze” plan in eight states is 122% higher than the cheapest plan currently available in those states, according to an IBD analysis of rate filings and a recent Government Accountability Office report.
The late July report, largely overlooked by the press, provides detailed information on insurance plans today in all 50 states, from the cheapest plans offered to a 30-year-old nonsmoker to the most expensive plans 55-year-old couples can buy.
A separate report from the Maryland insurance department lists the lowest-cost “bronze” plans proposed for ObamaCare exchanges in eight states.
Comparing the two reveals a wide gulf between the cheapest plans available now and those that will be sold next year under ObamaCare.
The thing is this is all by design. Single payer wasn’t going to pass so its now obvious the whole system was designed to fail:
Obamacare will fail. But here is the kicker: Obamacare is intended to fail. Why else would leftists enact a 2,700-page bill restructuring 1/6th of the domestic economy without bothering to first read the document?
The only remaining requirement for a fail forward in health care is deflecting the blame at the time of collapse. A few remaining private health insurers will do nicely. But if they go under too early in the fundamental transformation, the Left can always fall back on that old standby: Republican intransigence.
Expect the president and his allies to reluctantly conclude that the private market cannot cope with the complex demands of modern healthcare — greed being incompatible with the minimum requirements of social justice — so, sadly, we will need to embrace a Medicare-for-all single-payer healthcare system, just like other advanced democracies.
As working conditions decline in our increasingly one-size-fits-all healthcare system, employees will unionize. Millions of nurses, doctors, technicians, and administrators, all newly minted SEIU members, will then contribute mandatory dues into the coffers of the leftist politicians responsible for their economic distress.
That was written 9 months ago. Now it’s all coming to fruition as reports of unbelievable increases in health care prices keep coming out.
From the administration’s point of view, conceding that key parts of Obamacare cannot be implemented isn’t a failure if the effect is to swell enrollment on the exchanges. The insurance subsidy entitlement, administered through the exchanges, is the single-payer scheme at the heart of the law. If you peel away provisions like the employer mandate and Medicaid expansion, what’s left is a universal health care entitlement—enforced through the individual mandate and administered through the exchanges.
And what do we get from Republicans? Some are fighting to repeal lock, stock and barrel, but then we got the spineless who talk smack about ObamaCare but when it comes down it to they just want to get rid of certain provisions….just like the Socialists had hoped.
Indeed, the recent delays dramatically enhance the role of the exchanges in Obamacare. By postponing the $2,000-per-employee penalties imposed on large employers that do not offer qualified health insurance, the administration has in effect invited employers to forego offering insurance at all and dump their employees onto the exchanges instead.
And by suspending the requirement that states verify applicants’ eligibility for exchange subsidies, the administration solved a problem created by delaying the employer mandate. The law requires employers to report the details of their insurance offerings to the Internal Revenue Service so the agency can verify that workers have been offered affordable coverage, as required by the law. If an employer doesn’t offer affordable coverage, its employees can qualify for subsidies on the exchange. But delaying this employer reporting requirement meant there would be no way for the IRS to verify whether an employee qualified for subsidized coverage.
To get around this, the administration opted to allow the exchanges to run on the honor system. In a 600-page rule quietly posted late on July 5, the administration announced that state-based exchanges “may accept the applicant’s attestation” about their income and coverage status. Essentially, anyone who reports that they qualify for a subsidy is going to get one.
This amounts to a massive expansion of eligibility for federally-subsidized coverage through the exchanges—an expansion that is nowhere in the law and was never approved by Congress, but that moves Obamacare closer to a single-payer system.
The calculation behind these decisions is hard to miss. The more people get coverage through the exchanges, as opposed to their employers, the more federal assistance for health insurance will become the new normal. Once habituated to government welfare for insurance, Americans will be loath to give it up. Support for the law will then likely grow along with the rolls of those dependent on its subsidies, as has been the case with Medicare and Medicaid.
Unless the Republicans stand their ground this trainwreck is unavoidable.
We know Cruz and Lee will stand firm, but the rest?
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