Obamacare's Bait & Switch | Michael D. Tanner | Cato Institute: Commentary

Obamacare's Bait & Switch | Michael D. Tanner | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Obama has stopped talking about 'health-care reform.' The new poll-tested phrase of the day is 'health-insurance reform. Specifically the president says he wants to protect people with 'pre-existing conditions.'"

"But if that's what the president wants, he could already have a bill through Congress, with significant Republican support. In fact, even the insurance companies have agreed to it.

But the 1,017-page bill making its way through the House devotes all of six pages to insurance reform — 30 pages, if you count all the definitions and supporting provisions, still less than 3 percent of the bill."

"prohibiting insurers from charging more to older and sicker customers amounts to a tax on the young and healthy who must pay higher premiums to subsidize their less-healthy counterparts. And letting people buy insurance after they get sick means healthy people have little incentive to buy insurance.

Put the two together and, as the Congressional Budget Office has warned, the young and healthy are much more likely to simply do without insurance.

As the healthy leave the insurance pool, the proportion of sick in the pool grows ever greater, leading to higher premiums — which in turn causes the healthiest remaining individuals to leave in what amounts to an insurance death spiral."