PrintApril 6, 2010
ObamaCare Dominoes Begin to Fall
In my April 2, 2010 American Thinker article, "ObamaCare's Economic Dominoes," I noted that under ObamaCare medical healthcare insurers will be forced pay out 85% of all premiums collected as direct medical care and that as such payouts escalate, these insurers will be forced to do one of two things -- either raise premiums or cut costs and, hence, access to medical care for all its insured.
The Wall Street Journal reported that President Obama's Massachusetts protégé, Duval Patrick, has already painted a target on the back of nonprofit health insurers in that state:
...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.
The Journal article went on to note that Massachusetts "major insurers - Blue Cross Blue Shield, Harvard Pilgrim, Tufts Health Plan - are all nonprofits," which the state itself calculates already "spend at least 88 cents of every premium dollar on underlying cost of medical care, often more."
Massachusetts nonprofit health insurers, already paying out more in premium dollars than mandated under ObamaCare, have now been told by that state's Democrat governor and Democrat bureaucracy that raising premiums will not be permitted. In order to remain solvent, that leaves only one avenue for these nonprofits -- cut costs, and as the Journal stated, "force insurers to start restricting patient access to care in order to remain solvent."
