Health care law: the turmoil begins

There will be more of this. Much, much more. Hopefully, there's enough of it between now and November to enable more of it to be prevented down the road...

Health care law: the turmoil begins - Jacksonville Daily News

During the debates on federalized health care, there was no shortage of people projecting the negative consequences of such a policy. Those consequences are beginning to be realized.

Two of the country’s largest insurance providers, UnitedHealtcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield, already have stopped issuing new coverage for children and other plans.

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Officials were quick to call this an “unintended consequence” of the federal health care law. Unintended it might be, but it certainly wasn’t unexpected.

Expect it to get worse. With two of the largest companies out of the pool, the risk will become more concentrated among those that remain. The incentives for other companies to bail out, then, will only increase.

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We were warned about what would happen if we turned health care into yet another massive government bureaucracy. As those consequences begin to materialize we may express dismay or even anger. One thing we can’t honestly express, however, is surprise.

Of course, I'm not at all certain that this is, in fact, an unintended consequence. It is such an obvious consequence that it's much easier to believe that it is an intended consequence - it's not a bug, it's a feature! It is intended to drive us closer to the "holy grail" of socialized medicine - the single-payer universal health care that provides uniformly rotten rationed care for everyone, regardless of achievement or ability to pay.

Well, there will still be some who are able to "buy" better care than the great unwashed multitudes, but the currency will be pull, not legal tender...