Silence of the Lambs

Headline: “More Health-Care Insurers Seek Big Premium Increases”

According to the Wall Street Journal article (see above link), “Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois is looking to raise rates by averages of 29% or more. In Pennsylvania, Highmark Health Insurance Co. is asking for 30%, according to proposals submitted by insurers for the year ahead.” 

As yesterday’s CNN/ Money article disclosed, “Many [insurers] are proposing double-digit premium increases for individual policies, with some companies looking to boost rates more than 60%...”

Really?

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was enacted and implemented without being read by the Congress.  It was deliberately misrepresented to deceive the American people (see MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber). The President of the United States personally, repeatedly, and falsely assured the American people that (1) they would be able to keep their hospitals; (2) they would be able to keep their doctors; and (3) their insurance costs would go down. The hideously misnamed Affordable Care Act has been a giant fraudulent and destructive Lie from the very beginning.

Where is the outrage?  How much will finally be enough? Is the health care field’s appetite for deceit really infinite?

• Where are the professional and trade associations that helped design this fiasco?
• Where are the Washington politicians of both political parties who enacted The Affordable Care Act without having any idea of its impact on the people or the economy?
• Where are the mega health care systems that endorsed it?
• Where are the private practice physicians who are allowing their profession to be destroyed before their eyes?
• Where are the hospitals that are acquiecing to, and participating in, their own demise?
• Where are the American people whose efforts and generosity built the hospitals that are now disappearing after decades of giving care (and life) to the community?         
• Where are the religious orders that appear to have assented to the destruction of their institutions and their very missions?

What will happen when the public finally realizes that the ACA’s mandated “pay for performance” or “value-based purchasing” has herded them into very expensive and dysfunctional HMOs at the point of a federal gun? No worries. It is only an intermediate stop on the way to the “single-payer” (government-run) system, the central planner’s goal from the start. 

The silence is deafening. Perhaps it is time to sit back, relax, and re-read The Emperor’s New Clothes.

FJB

This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. It reflects the point of view of a life-long conservative constitutionalist and recovering Republican. If you are among the millions trying to understand what has happened to the GOP, please visit "Who Killed the Republican Party?" Thank you for your interest.