Unexpectedly!

“A snapshot of Obamacare enrollment in seven states suggests the law hasn’t significantly increased competition in health insurance markets,” notes Bloomberg News, the home of the ever-“unexpectedly” craptacular economic development, ever since the dawn of the Obama era:

A snapshot of Obamacare enrollment in seven states suggests the law hasn’t significantly increased competition in health insurance markets, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported.

In California, for example, four big insurers have largely carved up the state’s market. The divide is more equitable than before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as California’s insurance market is now “moderately concentrated” instead of “highly concentrated,” according to a measure of market share called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, said researchers at Kaiser, a Menlo Park, California-based nonprofit that focuses on health care.

“There are some examples of smaller or newer plans being able to get a sizable piece of the market in the exchanges, but by and large a lot of the players in the exchanges that are the biggest were the biggest before as well,” Cynthia Cox, a senior analyst at Kaiser, said in a phone interview.

Insurance companies signed onboard Mr. Obama’s risky tax scheme (to merge the memes from both Al Gore and the supine Justice John Roberts) with the goal of transforming themselves into the insurance equivalent of static regional electric utility companies, as Charles Krauthammer noted way back in August of 2009. So why on earth would anyone — other than the always “unexpectedly!” shocked Bloomberg of course — be surprised that Obamacare does little to improve competition? Only the free market does that, a notion that everyone involved in this scheme loathes with socialist fury.