Philip Klein warns Americans to “prepare for the next round of rate shock.” Here’s why:
The primary way is that it requires insurance plans to offer a certain raft of benefits specified by the government and to cover everybody who applies, regardless of pre-existing conditions. It then limits the amount that insurers can charge older and sicker patients relative to younger and healthier patients, driving the costs up for the latter group.
And then there’s this:
In addition, the law imposes over $100 billion in taxes on insurance plans between 2014 and 2022, and the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the taxes “would be largely passed through to consumers in the form of higher premiums for private coverage.”
Perhaps the saddest part in all this is with the insurance companies having been turned into vessels for distributing government benefits and enforcing government mandates, there’s no longer any room for innovation or disruption in the industry. Should some smart person come up with a better and cheaper way to do business, or an entirely new business model altogether, there’s no legal market for that new model or new business. It will simply die on the vine, and consumers will never know of it.
Everything goes through Washington now, which is exactly how Washington likes it.
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