From National Review Online, Jeffery Singer writes The ACA: A Train Wreck and a Lie.

Excerpts:

Before 1996, if you purchased individual health insurance through a broker, you would have been offered a “guaranteed renewability” option. This would guarantee that your policy could not be canceled if you developed an expensive and chronic condition. The insurance company would also have to renew the policy on its anniversary date without charging a higher premium because of the chronic condition. This option was so popular that, by 1996, 75 percent of people buying individual health insurance also bought the guaranteed-renewability option.

Then, in 1996, Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Among HIPAA’s many mandates was the requirement that all individual insurance plans have guaranteed renewabilityIt also prohibited all group health-insurance plans sold to businesses from denying coverage to individuals because of preexisting conditions.

And so, for the past 18 years, all insurance companies have been legally forbidden from dropping an individual policyholder who developed a chronic illness and have not been able to raise anyone’s rate because of it.

Ironically, the president tried to minimize the failure of his “like your plan, keep your plan” pledge by arguing, “We’re talking about 5 percent of the population.” In his State of the Union, he didn’t mention the 5 percent, which comes out to approximately 5.4 million Americans, who had their plans canceled because of the ACA. Instead, he patted himself on the back for helping free people from “substandard plans” that, he claims, would have dropped them if they developed some chronic and costly illness.

So to address a problem afflicting a minute portion of the under-65 population, Congress committed trillions of dollars to drop a nuclear bomb on the U.S. health-care system, remaking it in the image of your local DMV. For a tiny fraction of those trillions, Congress could have adopted one or more of the many alternative solutions to the problem faced by that small group of people, from the promotion of “health-status insurance” to the creation of viable high-risk pools.

HKO

We would have been far better off if we had approached the specific problems in the existing health care system such as renewability and cancellation instead of “nuking” the entire system to use the author’s analogy.  We would have been far more likely to get a strong bi partisan consensus and make real progress.

But in the vain attempt to enact “comprehensive” reform, we tried to centralize a complicated market and created far more problems than we solved.

Solving the specific problems in health care would have been effective governing, but comprehensive reform made for better political theatre, invoking ideological stereotypes and the vast expansion of government power.  By flying too close to the sun the government sacrificed its ability to actually solve problems and the essential trust of the governed.

 

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