Wednesday, December 5, 2012

The Left Makes Its Obamacare Motives Clear

The Commonwealth Fund released a study this morning regarding the impact of Obamacare’s medical loss ratio requirements on insurance plans – and the paper’s findings speak volumes about the Left’s move toward government-run health care.  Included on page 4 of the brief is this sentence regarding the impact of Obamacare’s changes:  “In 2010, individual insurers had an operating profit mar­gin of 0.15 percent overall, but this dropped to an oper­ating loss of –1.2 percent in 2011, amounting to a $351 million reduction in operating profits overall.”  In other words, in the individual insurance market, insurers lost money due to the new mandates imposed by Obamacare.  Those losses may be sustainable for one year, but if continued for long periods of time, carriers will doubtless drop out of insurance markets, or go out of business altogether.

So how did the Commonwealth paper characterize these troubling developments?  As “Substantial Gains for Consumers.”  Which raises an obvious follow-up:  Why would Commonwealth believe that making insurers unprofitable represents a “substantial gain” for consumers?

The obvious follow-up question has an equally obvious answer:  Because the Commonwealth Fund, like the rest of the left, wants to create a government-run health system – and deliberately making private insurers unprofitable under the aegis of “consumer benefits” represents a necessary precursor to that goal of socialized medicine.  Or, to use a Shakespearean analogy, Commonwealth hopes to praise private insurance in order to bury it.  That’s the true story of this morning’s report.