As President Obama spent Wednesday celebrating the six-month
anniversary of the national health care law, his crowning
legislative achievement remained deeply unpopular.
Despite repeated claims by proponents of the law that Americans
would begin to warm up to it once it was enacted, more than 49
percent of the public currently opposes the law, according to
an average of polls compiled by Pollster.com, compared with just 41
percent who favor it. Those numbers are virtually identical to
where they stood when Obama signed the legislation in March.
The months since passage of ObamaCare have been marked by the
evaporation of one promise after another. Contrary to the rhetoric
employed by Democrats when they were ramming the unpopular measure
through Congress, further evidence has confirmed that the law will
increase
costs,
raise premiums, and
cause Americans to lose their current coverage — even if
they like it.
Yet this is no time for opponents of the law to become
complacent. ObamaCare boosters are already laying the groundwork to
use the failures of the law to advocate a further expansion of the
government’s role in health care.
A perfect example is the uproar over recent
reports that insurers were citing the new health care law as
part of their rationale for raising premiums. In response to the
news, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a
threatening letter to the insurance industry lobby, America’s
Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), warning that there will be “zero
tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate
increases.” Sebelius also added that, “I want AHIP’s members to be
put on notice: the Administration, in partnership with states, will
not tolerate unjustified rate hikes in the name of consumer
protections.”
Democratic Sens. Max Baucus and Jay Rockefeller
echoed Sebelius, declaring in a letter to leading carriers, “If
an insurer thinks it can blame the enactment of the Affordable Care
Act for its rising premiums, it is surely mistaken.”
It’s not hard to see where this is eventually heading. During
the health care debate, liberals argued that regulation alone could
not rein in the insurance industry, which is why we needed to
create a new government-run plan, or so-called “public option.” But
the public option ended up getting dropped so that Democrats could
corral the votes necessary to move the legislation through the
Senate.
As premiums go up in response to ObamaCare, expect to see a lot
of Democrats, egged on by their liberal base, make the following
argument: “See, we tried to give insurance companies a chance to
clean up their act, but they continued their abusive practices. Now
we need a public option.” Over time, this can easily morph into an
argument for a fully government-run, or single-payer, health care
system (which Obama has long described as
his ideal).
To prevent this scenario from playing out, it’s important for
the law’s opponents to go beyond scoring short-term political
points (i.e., “Obama said premiums would go down, and he lied”),
and to use this as an opportunity to educate the public on
precisely why liberal health care policies have the detrimental
effects that they do, and to advocate alternatives.
It’s no surprise that the new health care law, which requires
insurers to offer more generous benefits, would make premiums go
up. In the pre-ObamaCare health care system, state regulators
already created over 2,000 benefits that insurers were mandated to
cover,
according to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance — and
those benefits drove up the cost of health insurance by 20 percent
to 50 percent. It’s one reason why coverage in
highly-regulated New York costs more than double what it does in
neighboring Pennsylvania, according to
data from eHealthInsurance.com.
ObamaCare adds a raft of new mandates on top of existing state
mandates. The Congressional Budget Office determined
that an earlier version of the law would increase premiums in the
individual market by 10 percent to 13 percent over where they would
be without the law’s passage.
Some of the mandated benefits — such as the “slacker mandate”
that forces insurers to allow younger adults to stay on their
parents’ policies until the age of 26 — are popular in isolation.
That’s why it’s imperative to remind the public that the flip side
of having the government require additional benefits is that it
will drive up premiums for everybody else.
The alternative to the liberal approach is to shift away from a
system that is dominated by government and employers, and toward a
system where individuals have more control over their own health
care dollars and can choose polices that best suit their budget and
medical needs.
While ObamaCare supporters may be on the defensive right now,
it’s important to remember that advocates of government-run health
care will use any angle to build on their gains — even if it means
exploiting the failures of government health care.
