Posted on 04/03/2010 8:42:13 AM PDT by reaganaut1
This is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor and now Presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts," President Obama said in a recent interview defending his national health-care plan—and few disagree, Mitt Romney excepted. So the Massachusetts preview of ObamaCare is all the more instructive after this week's imposition of de facto price controls on its remaining private insurers.
On Thursday, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick's insurance regulators announced that they had rejected 235 of 274 insurer requests for premium increases for individuals and small businesses over the coming year. This power has been on the books since 1977 but never used, and Mr. Patrick announced in February that he was dusting it off as an opening bid for rate-setting for hospitals, doctors and all other providers as well. The state's health costs have risen to the nation's highest since Beacon Hill passed the ObamaCare prototype that was supposed to reduce health costs.
The premium increases were "excessive and unreasonable," Mr. Patrick said in a statement, though his insurance division issued no actuarial analysis to justify its decision. "Now, the big insurance companies will criticize this action," he said. "But the fact is that for three years now, both they and health-care providers have sat around the table talking the issue of excessive cost to death and coming up with no solutions." In other words, price controls are supposedly the only option.
Yet campaigns against the insurance industry are always the first political resort, as Mr. Obama's assault on Anthem Blue Cross of California showed. In Massachusetts, however, the major insurers—Blue Cross Blue Shield, Harvard Pilgrim, Tufts Health Plan—are all nonprofits. The state itself calculates that they spend at least 88 cents of every premium dollar on the underlying costs of medical care, often more.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The private insurers will now disappear, one by one, in Taxachussets, as they are driven out of business.
This is the critical next step in ObamaCare that awaits us all, UNLESS WE REPEAL AND REPLACE.
Gov. Patrick’s popularity numbers are in the cellar and sinking fast. He happens to be Obama’s BFF. In fact, they’re joined at the hip. Unfortunately, I live in Taxachusetts and having to admit Patrick is our governor is utterly humiliating.
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