Friday, April 9, 2010

Massachusetts Health Insurers Going Galt

(As reported in the Wall Street Journal "Massachusetts Insurance Blackout." Subscription required, but a summary by NCPA can be found here.)


Price controls on Massachusetts' health insurance premiums for small business and individual policies are set too low to be profitable. After experiencing heavy operating losses for 2009, the insurance companies appealed to the state to lift the rate cap--but were denied permission to raise premiums. Instead of continuing to operate at a loss, the insurers have decided to stop selling new policies.

This is just the latest in "unintended consequences" of Massachusetts' universal health care laws which, just like ObamaCare, include both individual and employer mandates.

Since the introduction of Romney Care in 2006, health care costs in Massachusetts have risen twice as fast the rest of the nation, wait times for appointments have increased, physician shortage has been aggravated, emergency room visits have increased, hospitals are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Fewer people are uninsured, but all of the other problems that RomneyCare (and ObamaCare) are supposed to address have worsened.

Anyone with a modicum of economic understanding will find these developments unsurprising.

This is economic malpractice at its most egregious. Government has been destroying health care freedom, affordability and access for decades.

Obama and our congressmen must be held accountable, and ObamaCare must be repealed.

Your lives and your health care depend on it.

.

4 comments:

blnelson said...

That there are no insurance companies issuing new policies may be an unintended consequence of the Massachusetts health care debacle; I believe however, it is a specifically intended consequence - in their plan to reach a single payer system - by the Obama gang.

HaynesBE said...

bln--
You may be right. I find it hard to discern how much the current administration understands full extent of the consequences of their policies. If they really understood the consequences, they would know that single-payer health care (a.k.a. socialized medicine) is doomed to fail. I don't know how to judge at what point they quit thinking in order to figure out what is intended, and what is unintended. Until I have hard evidence, I will give them the benefit of doubt -which really isn't giving them much because it means either they are evil or they are incompetent. Neither is very pretty.

Anonymous said...

Beth,

I used to think incompetent but after watching Pelosi-Reid-Obama operate over the last year I switched my vote to evil. But upon further reflection I realized it's not an either/or proposition: there's no reason they can't be both.

Great post!

- cfc

HaynesBE said...

cfc--
I must admit, I lean toward thinking its a mixture of evil and incompetent.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting.