Obama care what are your thoughts?

Health Insurance Rates Increasing By Double Digits Under O’s ‘Affordable’ Care Act

By Rat on January 7, 2013 • ( 8 )

Remember when the San Fran Hag, Nancy Pelosi, infamously told us we had to pass ObamaCare so we could find out what was in it? Or, how the disingenuous community organizer droned on and on about making healthcare affordable for “everyone”?

Unfortunately, Pelosi was right; but the community organizer? Not so much.
Yep, here we are, barely a week into 2013, and as reported by The New York Times - the bible of the left - health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the (supposed) primary objectives of the ObamaCare – oops – the “Affordable” Care Act – was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers. From The NYT:
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22%, Anthem Blue Cross 26% and Blue Shield of California 20% for some policyholders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39% rate increase sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014. Continue reading…

Health Insurers rightly claim that increased medical costs are mostly to blame for the double-digit rate requests. Moreover, the guaranteed-issue provision built into ObamaCare increases costs for the insurers, who cannot draw all of the needed revenues from the high-risk pool, courtesy of ObamaCare’s mandates on rates. As a result, higher costs must be spread among everyone in the risk pool – a basic insurance concept completely lost on Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

While I’m no fan of the insurance companies, I am a fan of understanding the reality of business and the free market: for-profit companies pass down increased costs to their customers – be they tax increases, higher cost of materials, increased labor costs, on the case of the health insurers, higher medical costs of their policyholders. Again, basic 101 stuff that the progressive socialists pretend to fail to grasp.
Given that ObamaCare doesn’t go full metal jacket on America until 2014, when even more mandates and regulations are scheduled to take effect – many of which are based on state exchanges that may never even exist in more than half of the states, is it any wonder that health insurance companies are doing their damnedest to protect themselves while they still have the legal right to do so?