Obamacare Is at a Crossroads
And the liberal direction will lead to single payer
Peter Suderman's excellent post this morning noted how Obamacare is turning into a spectacular failure. Insurance giant Aetna is pulling out from exchanges in 11 of 15 states, joining
the stampede by other underwriters. And some – though by no means all—liberals are grudgingly even beginning to acknowledge that the dreaded death spiral of adverse selection is setting in, I note in The Week.
So Obamacare, it is becoming clear, is unsustainable as it is and will soon be at a crossroads. It can either go in a more free market direction and give consumers more control over their own health care dollars and use market competition to curb escalating premiums.
Or it can become a full-blown single-payer government insurance monopoly with private underwriters completely driven out of the health care market.
But instead of fully coming clean on the fact that single-payer is the ineluctable logic of government intervention in the health insurance marketplace, liberals are pretending that a "public option" — creating a government plan to compete with the Aetnas of the world — will fix the death spiral, I note.
Go here to read why they are wrong.