“What I’m not willing to do is go back to the days when insurance companies could deny someone coverage because of a pre-existing condition,” President Obama said during his State of the Union address. For the most part, this claim (or at least its plain inference) is nonsense: Obamacare’s requirement that insurers must take anyone, no matter how sick they already are, without charging them a premium that would remotely cover the cost of their care, wouldn’t kick in for three more years.

But one place that this sophomoric denial of basic economic realities has already kicked in is in the market for child-only insurance policies. The predictable result has been that insurers have abandoned that market en masse, rather than selling such policies at a loss. This may well provide a preview of future events in the wider insurance market if Obamacare isn’t repealed.