(Investors Business Daily) - Crony Capitalism: The New York Times this week reports that ObamaCare has made strange bedfellows between the insurance industry and the federal government. Who could have imagined that?
Just before the 2012 elections, we wrote in this space that, should President Obama get re-elected, repealing ObamaCare would be virtually impossible because the law “will have fundamentally reshaped the insurance market.”
A few months later, we alerted readers again that after insurers “conformed their businesses to the many market distortions it will create,” even those that once opposed ObamaCare “could end up lobbying for it.”
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In January this year, we pointed to a set of Blue Cross Blue Shield Association talking points, in which its CEO warned about “momentum that is quickly building among some leading conservatives” for a bill to defund the law’s huge industry bailout programs.
Well, now The New York Times has discovered that, lo and behold, ”the relationship between the Obama administration and insurers has evolved into a powerful, mutually beneficial partnership.”
Mutually beneficial is right. In fact, the industry is positively glowing about the opportunities big government provides. “Our government business is growing along multiple fronts,” WellPoint CEO Joseph Swedish boasted. The company called Medicaid “highly profitable.”
WellPoint now relies on government programs for 45% of its operating revenues.
Aetna, which depends on taxpayer money for 40% of its premiums, said “excellent performance in our government business” contributed to “a very good year.”
So what does Obama get out of the deal? He gets industry protection for his pet reform.
As the Times explains, insurers that “have built their business plans around the law… will strenuously resist Republican efforts to dismantle it.” Sound familiar?
They’re already helping out. A division of UnitedHealth Group chipped in to rebuild HealthCare.gov after its disastrous opening, the Times notes, while insurers have backed Obama in court fights over the law.
What’s more, rather than focus on ObamaCare’s flaws, insurers have attacked the drug industry for its “arbitrary” prices on new specialty drugs — all but begging the government to impose price controls.
It turns out that ObamaCare’s biggest victory for liberals may not be a brand new middle-class entitlement, but that it enlisted one of the largest industries in the country to lobby endlessly for more government.
If Republicans ever hope to overturn ObamaCare, they’ll have to fight a two-front war — with liberals on one side and the insurance industry on the other.
And they’ll have to decide whether they are defenders of a free, open and competitive insurance market, or defenders of a corrupt and costly form of crony capitalism.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/111814-727026-how-obamacare-turned-insurers-into-big-government-lovers.htm#ixzz3JWe5OmbD
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