ObamaCare's "consumer protections are hurting millions of Americans"

In an op-ed for Kaiser Health News, Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute goes after the supposed "consumer protections" in the new health care law:

These supposed consumer protections are hurting millions of Americans by increasing the cost of insurance, increasing the cost of hiring and driving insurers out of business.
At the same time Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius was threatening to bankrupt insurers who claim ObamaCare is increasing premiums by more than 1 percent, her own employees estimated that one of the law's regulations – the  requirement to purchase unlimited annual coverage – will increase some people's premiums by 7 percent or more when fully implemented. A Connecticut insurer estimated that just the provisions taking effect last year would increase some premiums by 20-30 percent.

Such mandates force consumers to divert income from food, housing, and education to pay for the additional coverage. That can leave consumers worse off, even threaten their health. They can also force employers to reduce hiring, leaving some Americans with neither a job nor health insurance. This reality led McDonald's to seek a waiver from the unlimited annual coverage mandate, among other rules.

The ban on discriminating against children with pre-existing conditions has caused insurers to stop selling child-only policies in dozens of states. The dependent-coverage mandate was cited as one of the reasons spurring a Service Employees International Union local in New York City to eliminate coverage for 6,000 dependent children.

In 2008, Congress passed a similar mandate that supporters said would expand coverage for mental-health and substance-abuse services. Instead, that mandate spurred the Screen Actors Guild to eliminate mental-health coverage for 12,000 of its lower-paid members. It had the same effect on 3,500 members of the Chicago's Plumbers Welfare Fund, and 2,200 employees of Woodman's Food Market in Wisconsin. Other employers are curtailing access to mental-health services thanks to this mandate, and some insurers have stopped selling such coverage altogether.

Read the whole thing here.