Those who thought President Obama had “fixed” the inequities in his signature health-care legislation with an announcement last week should have been paying attention on Monday to the results of a meeting held in the White House with insurance industry CEOs. If the companies thought the administration was planning on helping them deal with the fallout from the president’s edict that those who had lost their coverage as a result of ObamaCare could get their old policies back, they were in for a rude awakening. Shifting gears to allow the president to claim that he is making good on his oft-repeated promise after following the law and cancelling those policies is going to create chaos for the industry as well as cost them a fortune. But though the whole mess is his fault, the president made it clear they will get no subsidies or help. Since the president’s solution will rely on companies to take a bath on this as well as the permission of state insurance commissioners, its highly doubtful that those negatively affected by the legislation will get much relief.
This is significant not just because it shows that the president’s hour-long press conference last week during which he apologized for his false promises–even as he made it obvious that he knew all along that his blanket proclamations that no one would lose their coverage or their doctor was false. Nor is it only important because it is one more of a series of problems about ObamaCare that began but certainly did not end with a dysfunctional website. The real issue here is that the problem that has been dumped on the insurance companies and the states with little hope that they can sort it out to the satisfaction of consumers is a foreshadowing of problems to come that we haven’t even imagined.
When ObamaCare was passed in 2010, it was not a secret that the bill was an ill-conceived mess, long on big promises and chock-full of confusing details that no one—especially then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—had a clue about. If, as she memorably said, the bill had to be passed first before Congress could figure out was in it, she wasn’t kidding. What is now unfolding is not just an administration embarrassment about a website or a president credibility gap. What the president and his party must deal with is a monstrous piece of legislation that is filled with moving parts that don’t fit and that are bound to cause an endless series of controversies that will swell the growing ranks of ObamaCare losers. That is why the president’s poll numbers are sinking to record lows and Democrats must come to terms with the fact that rather than growing in popularity as they hoped and Republicans feared, ObamaCare may be headed for eventual failure.
It is no small irony that ObamaCare was passed in part because the insurance industry decided that the smart play was to not oppose it. Though it was always at its core a wealth redistribution scheme that would adversely affect much of the middle class in order to benefit some of the poor, the insurance companies figured they could make money off of it as easily as in the existing system. That they are now being left in the lurch on the question of private insurance by the president they embraced as a partner will generate no sympathy for them from conservatives who are bitter about the role they played in passing this monstrosity. Nor will the left, which would prefer to see them run out of business by a national single-payer system, shed a tear for them. But the problems the companies will encounter in trying to pick up the pieces from the president’s broken promise will only add to the growing chaos that is being caused by the bill’s disastrous rollout.
With no firm assurances that the website will be fixed and little likelihood that enough healthy people can be herded in to the exchanges to pay more for insurance than they are used to in order to finance those who will pay nothing, the prospect of an ObamaCare collapse is no longer a far-fetched scenario. Ultimately, everyone’s coverage and rates will be affected by this fiasco. That’s why the belief that sooner or later the general public would regard ObamaCare as untouchable once it went into effect was misplaced. Unlike other expansions of government benefits such as Social Security and Medicare that were paid for by future taxpayers, the ObamaCare losers are made up of the middle class of the present.
Like the insurance companies, this vast class of consumers won’t be getting any bailout or congressional-style exemptions. Rather than making another historic addition to the roster of entitlement programs envisioned by progressives, all the president may have done is to create a vast group of Americans who are finding out they are being bilked by the administration. And there’s no fix for that in the president’s tool kit or in the IT experts called in to repair the website.
