By Daniel Payne
Friday, October 28, 2016
So it turns out that, in spite of all those rosy
predictions of Obamacare’s inevitable success, the law isn’t working: health
insurance premiums on the federal exchanges are going to spike by an average of
25 percent nationwide next year.
This was both predictable and predicted. Indeed, the only
people who seemed totally unaware of Obamacare’s inevitable death spiral were
the folks who wrote the law, passed it, and championed it for the past six
years. Nobody bothered to clue the Democrats in. (Nobody bothered to clue the
journalists in, either.)
Sarah Kliff, one of Vox’s editors, thinks she has found
the solution to Obamacare’s woes: “Obamacare’s mandate isn’t strong enough.”
Apparently the Affordable Care Act’s tax/penalty/whatever it was simply didn’t
go far enough: it turns out it was cheaper for young, healthy individuals to
avoid health insurance altogether and just pay the fine rather than buy a plan
with expensive premiums. The solution to Kliff and others is more Obamacare:
higher taxes on people who don’t purchase health insurance.
Got that? Obamacare—a program that effectively
nationalized one-sixth of the U.S. economy, rewrote the relationship between
American citizen and American state, and imposed a national tax upon people for
the high crime of not doing anything at all—didn’t go far enough.
Most of us always knew it would come to this: the serious
systemic failures of Obamacare would pile up, year after year, until some wonk
somewhere would discover the solution: more government. The great irony, of
course, is that Obamacare itself was inspired by a colossal failure of
government health-care policy.
There are a whole host of reasons why the American health
care is uniquely dysfunctional and counterproductive, and for the most part
they are reasons related to government: too much regulation, too many stupid
assumptions, too many half-baked tax schemes and mandates and building codes
and licensing requirements.
But perhaps the most pernicious problem—certainly the
most systemic one—is this: when all of these government problems take their
inevitable negative toll on the health-care market, there is always someone
waiting around to say, “Wait a second, guys—maybe we need more regulations and higher taxes!”
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