Obamas health care plan

Obama-don't-care

The lies that the president told to sell his defective product would land a CEO in big trouble

The Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last got a good grilling in Congress about the Obamacare debacle. But if she were the CEO of a company, she might have faced not Congress but a grand jury for launching an unsafe product without proper testing based on a fraudulent sales pitch and misleading information.
 
Sebelius has admitted that Healthcare.gov—the federal online shopping exchange that is the lynchpin of the program—required one year of successful testing before launch. Instead it got two weeks of failed testing. If an automaker had knowingly put a vehicle on the road without appropriate crash tests, this administration, the self-appointed guardian of consumers, would have taken it to the mat.

But just like a defective car, Obamacare’s defective exchange is not just a nuisance; it will destabilize the health insurance industry and jeopardize coverage. Yet the administration’s march to enforce its law continues unabated.

The “glitches” in the exchange, many fear, will accelerate Obamacare’s insurance death spiral. The folks who’ll take the trouble to sign up will be the sick and poor who qualify for subsidies. The rest—especially the young invincibles—will likely go elsewhere, forcing them to raise rates.

But because Obamacare bars participating companies from offering different prices to their exchange and non-exchange customers, these rates will go up for all their customers. This will allow non-participating competitors—that face no similar stricture—to bid away their healthier and wealthier customers.

The participating companies will then face this choice: Stay in the exchange and risk extinction or quit. Either way, exchange patients will have fewer choices and pricier plans compared to non-exchange patients—defeating the whole purpose of Obamacare.

To head off this dynamic, the administration has engaged in what can only be described as deception.

The exchange initially wouldn’t let people even window shop without first submitting their income information so that it could offer them subsidized quotes and prevent them from walking away in sticker shock. But when this crashed the website, the administration switched tactics.