Friday, October 5, 2012

Washington’s Government Takeover of Health Care

The Washington Post reported yesterday of a major development in Obamacare implementation here in Washington:

The District’s small businesses may have to buy their employee health insurance through a city-run exchange come 2014, following a controversial vote by a city board.  The D.C. Health Benefit Exchange Authority, charged with implementing the federal health-care overhaul law, voted Wednesday to accept a recommendation that all health-insurance plans sold in the city for 50 members or fewer must be purchased through the exchange.

In other words, you can buy any plan you like – so long as it’s the government plan.

District officials attempted to defend this onerous mandate by saying they needed to ensure a viable marketplace: “For the exchange to be sustainable, it has to have approximately 100,000 people…If the exchange isn’t sustainable in the long haul, if it does not have enough people, then we are wasting our time and our effort.”  This is the same kind of logic that led Democrats to create the unprecedented mandate that nearly all Americans purchase a product for the first time ever – because Obamacare would be unsustainable without a large market.  Now we get word that even with an individual insurance mandate, one key element of Obamacare – the Exchange – could be “unsustainable” and a “waste of time” without even more government intrusion – telling people not just to buy something, nor just what to buy, but even where to buy it.

As one letter of opposition from the D.C. business community noted, Barack Obama repeatedly promised that “you will not have to change plans” under Obamacare.  This week’s development in the District of Columbia is yet another illustration of that broken promise.  Moreover, the fact that Washington wants to shut down the private health insurance market and replace it with a government-run Exchange further proves that Obamacare is indeed a government takeover of health care.