Obama coddles insurance companies

by Brian Schwartz | 1:30 am, March 11, 2010 | Comments Off

Jacon Sullum explains at Reason.com:

“We allow the insurance industry to run wild in this country,” President Obama declared on Monday. “We can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.”

Yet Obama’s plan to tame health insurers would boost their business, protect them from competition, and guarantee their profits, all at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. It is therefore not surprising that the insurance companies, while they object to the president’s rhetoric and quibble over some of the details, are happy to be domesticated. Here are five ways in which Obama would help insurers while pretending to fight them.

Sullum lists the following:

• The individual mandate.
• The employer mandate.
• Subsidies.
• Regulations.
• Limits on competition.

Sullum continues:

As [Obama] himself notes, “they’re going to have 30 million new customers” thanks to the government’s mandates and subsidies. …

… Obama’s plan would use money forcibly extracted from taxpayers and policyholders to keep insurers healthy. He says this arrangement means “insurance companies would finally be held accountable to the American people.”

The collectivist language is telling. I don’t want insurance companies to be “accountable to the American people”; I want them to be accountable to me, as a consumer.

Read the whole article; it’s great: Insurers Gone Wild! Why health insurers welcome Obama’s plan to tame them.

See also ABC news: A Complicated Enemy: Obama Seeks to Vilify Health Insurers, Give Them $336 Billion Check.

(Reason article via the Institute for Health Freedom)

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