Michael F. Cannon is sounding the alarm on Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s disturbing attitude toward free speech among health insurance companies: 

President Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is still threatening to bankrupt insurance companies who tell their customers that ObamaCare‘s mandates will increase premiums by more than 2 percent, even though her department’s projections show that, starting this week, just one of the law’s new mandates will increase some premiums by nearly 7 percent. 

In a CBS News story last week, Sebelius tried to defend those indefensible threats:

But don’t the insurance companies have a right to make their own analyses and claims to their customers?

“Absolutely, they have a right to communicate with their customers,” replied HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “We just want to make sure that communication is as accurate as possible.”

The government can and should police fraud — but that’s not what Sebelius is doing.  She is suppressing legitimate differences of opinion in the pursuit of political gain.

The power to bully companies into silence is just one of many, many powers ripe for abuse granted to Sebelius in the health care bill. Philip Klein explored a number of those powers in an article for the June issue of the Spectator.