Obamacare Is Uninsuring the Insured

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Obamacare Is Uninsuring the Insured
by Doug Badger
August 10, 2017

The law expanded coverage among the poor at the expense of coverage among the middle class.

The number of people with individual health-insurance coverage is shrinking. Despite $146 billion in federal subsidies to low-income households and well-capitalized insurers, 2.6 million fewer people had individual policies in March 2017 than in March 2016, a drop of nearly 15 percent.
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And all this “needless turmoil” antedated the Trump administration. He took office during the closing days of the 2017 open-enrollment period. By then, the die was cast. The narrative nevertheless endures. Believing it requires indifference to millions of people who can no longer afford individual policies and to millions more who may forfeit their policies with the next round of rate hikes. For many of them, Obamacare has been a serial nightmare, producing policy cancellations, skyrocketing premiums and deductibles, and a narrowing choice of doctors before finally leaving them uninsured.

Obamacare is insuring more poor people and uninsuring millions of middle-income people. That suits the Democratic party and many congressional Republicans just fine. They measure social progress in the number of people receiving government assistance. Those struggling to pay their own way evoke little sympathy. Lawmakers of both parties, whose consciences were lacerated by CBO’s theory that millions would “lose” coverage under the GOP’s “repeal and replace” legislation (most of those “losses” the result of people voluntarily dropping insurance once the individual mandate was repealed) are unmoved that millions actually have lost coverage under the law they fought to preserve.

Legislators do, however, grieve over insurance-company losses. The NEJM editorial urged Congress to “bolster insurers’ confidence” through a “permanent reinsurance program” — a new entitlement to corporate welfare.

It is a familiar story: Corporations get bailouts, the poor get benefits, and those in between get the bill. It is a familiar story: Corporations get bailouts, the poor get benefits, and those in between get the bill. . . .

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