Do you have even an inkling of support for free market policies? A modicum of belief in free enterprise? Here’s a stop-whatever-you’re-doing article from Forbes writer Avik Roy. He reports on disheartening news in light of recent ACA failures.
Roy opens with a rally cry, saying, “Of all of the last-minute delays, website bungles, and Presidential whims that have marred the roll-out of Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges, what happened on Thursday, December 12 will stand as one of the most lawless acts yet committed by this administration.” The White House—who’s already canceled Americans’ old health plans, and has botched the system for enrolling people in new ones—is well aware that millions of Americans are going to enter the new year without health coverage. Yet instead of actually fixing anything, they have a new solution. They are going to to try to retroactively force insurers to hand out free health care—even at a potential loss—to those people uninsured through the White House-induced fiasco. Roy asks, “If Obamacare wasn’t a government takeover of the health insurance industry, then what is it now?”
Of course, as expected, HHS told reporters it would be “urging issuers to give consumers additional time to pay their first month’s premium and still have coverage beginning January 1, 2014.” But Roy translates this doublespeak into “urging [insurers] to offer free care to those who haven’t paid.” That’s because this issue is compounded by ANOTHER major oversight (one that the media’s covered marginally) — payment. Get this, the government hasn’t built the system that would allow people who’ve signed up for plans to actually pay for them.
Yikes. This is red tape that’s so thick, we’re not sure you can call it tape anymore. When is everyone going to wake up and realize that it’s unconstitutional to force insurers to cover people for free?
Yes, one could liken government intervention to Mordor – they are two destinations we’d steer clear of…