The end of Barack Obama’s presidency is near, and his most important domestic policy accomplishment is teetering and threatening to fall and smash to pieces.
Obamacare, or at least the most-touted part of it, is failing, and for not for mere technical reasons.
By expanding Medicare, it got more people insured. But the president’s experiment manipulating private insurance markets has created no net benefit and is headed for disaster unless enrollment miraculously skyrockets.
That’s why Obama has lately been begging the public to enroll ahead of this year’s fourth marketplace enrollment period. He also intends to beg taxpayers and lawmakers to expand his program and throw more money into it rather than gut it.
He faces two challenges doing this. First, people who lacked and wanted health insurance lept at Obamacare early, or as soon as its badly designed exchange portals would let them. People who today remain uninsured today are simply less interested in getting insurance. That’s why they still haven’t gone out and gotten it. Sorry Obamacare, they’re just not that into you!
The second challenge becomes apparent when you ask, “Why?” The main reason, accounting for 57 percent of the uninsured, is that Obamacare’s premiums cost too much.
A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis this week found that more than half of those remaining uninsured are not eligible for subsidies, so they’d have to pay all of the inflated prices that Obamacare has created, and which are rising fast despite promises to the contrary.
What these customers get for their money is usually much worse than what was available at a lower price (in real terms) in 2010. Obamacare prices shot up like a cliff face because the widely-loathed law requires insurance plans to cover things and provide “free” goodies that many people don’t want or need. (If you’re in the market for a Chevy and Washington says you must buy a Rolls-Royce, you’re likely to doubt that you need a car at all.) So insurers have tried to save money by chopping providers out of their networks and requiring customers to pay much higher deductibles before they get help with their medical bills.
Despite taking these steps to cover their own spiraling costs, insurers are losing so much money that they’re fleeing Obamacare exchanges faster than temperamental college students in search of a safe space.
All this means Obamacare will need a complete bipartisan overhaul abolishing major parts of the law. And the next president will have no choice but to sign it.
Interestingly, a full year ago, Hillary Clinton’s campaign adviser Chris Jennings warned senior aides in emails (now made public by WikiLeaks) that Obamacare was on a path to crash and burn. It suggests that Clinton may not think Obama knows what he’s doing, and won’t double down on his failure.
