Uh-huh, and you believed all those chain emails about Obama your uncle forwarded you, too. Fetal alcohol syndrome is a tough lot in life.
Speaking of Obama
They told you Obamacare would discipline the insurance giants. Force them to compete. Drive down premiums through the magic of an online marketplace with a clean government website.
Then you watched the website crash in October 2013, and you watched UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Anthem post record profits while your deductible climbed past $6,000.
Here is what the exchanges actually built. The law forced you to buy a product under penalty of the individual mandate, then handed the insurers a fountain of taxpayer cash to make the product look affordable. Premium tax credits flowed straight to the carriers, not to you. In 2017 the federal government paid roughly $42 billion in subsidies, and that money landed in corporate accounts. The cost-sharing reduction payments did the same thing. The risk corridor program promised to backstop insurer losses outright, which is to say it socialized the downside while the executives kept the upside. Guaranteed customers. Guaranteed revenue. A captive market created by statute. Any cartel in history would have killed for terms like that.
Free market economists have a plain name for this arrangement: rent-seeking. When a firm earns its money by extracting subsidies through political channels instead of by serving customers who choose freely, it stops being a business and becomes a tax farmer. The insurers lobbied for the mandate because they understood the arithmetic better than the voters did. America's Health Insurance Plans spent millions backing the bill, then acted shocked when premiums on the individual market more than doubled between 2013 and 2017 in many states. They were not the victims of the law. They wrote the parts that mattered.
Strip away the subsidy and the whole structure collapses, because the prices were never real prices. A real price emerges when a buyer who can walk away meets a seller who can lose the sale. The exchange killed both conditions. You could not walk away without a penalty, and the seller could not lose because Washington covered the gap. This is not a market. The people who keep calling it one are counting on you not noticing who cashes the check.
Que up another Mom joke you Statist Twit
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