Predicting the Lie of Obamacare Succes

Sometime, when the “glitches” with the Affordable Care Act websites are fixed and the system is chugging along dysfunctionally, someone is going to start sharing the number of folks who have signed up for “cheap, affordable” healthcare. Those numbers will tell us that thousands upon thousands of people are signing up and we will be lead to believe that those people were the kinds of folks who used to be shut out of the system because they couldn’t afford care or because they had pre-existing conditions. There will be some truth to those assertions.

And there will be a huge lie, too.

See, with literally hundreds of thousands of people losing their insurance coverage because of the ACA, a huge number of the first wave of folks signing up will very likely be those who had, until recently, been covered. That is, they had already been in the system, they had already had coverage, and they had already entered into a voluntary contractual relationship with insurance companies, paid their money, and had their needs met. Perversely, that voluntary relationship was destroyed by the ACA, which then compels an involuntary relationship with another insurance company. Even better, with the new rules, some of those folks will likely be getting government subsidies on their insurance costs.

Read this from a Kaiser Health News story:

Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies.

The main reason insurers offer is that the policies fall short of what the Affordable Care Act requires starting Jan. 1. Most are ending policies sold after the law passed in March 2010.  At least a few are cancelling plans sold to people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Now, let’s say it again: the government will be paying people to break their voluntary contractual relationships in order to compel them into doing what they were already doing.  And those folks will then be held up as examples of how well the system is working. And we will be told that this is more efficient and effective.

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