Ed Morrissey
HotAir.com
4/21/2010
After all, why stop at federal mandates on coverage? If Congress wants to really destroy the insurance industry, they need to start setting price controls to accelerate their collapse. According to the New York Times, Senate Democrats have already begun laying the groundwork for it:
Fearing that health insurance premiums may shoot up in the next few years, Senate Democrats laid a foundation on Tuesday for federal regulation of rates, four weeks after President Obama signed a law intended to rein in soaring health costs.
After a hearing on the issue, the chairman of the Senate health committee, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said he intended to move this year on legislation that would “provide an important check on unjustified premiums.”
Mr. Harkin praised a bill introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, that would give the secretary of health and human services the power to review premiums and block “any rate increase found to be unreasonable.” Under the bill, the federal government could regulate rates in states where state officials did not have “sufficient authority and capability” to do so.
This should prompt a rather embarrassing question: wasn’t ObamaCare supposed to prevent this very problem? Congressional Democrats and the White House certainly sold it as a cost-containment measure. They promised that their top-down, heavy regulatory approach would “bend the cost curve downward,” which should mean lower premium costs. The federal mandate was also supposed to reduce the rate of premium increases by forcing all of the healthy consumers in the US to buy, er, a comprehensive health insurance plan that they don’t need.
The article continues at HotAir.com
Read also “Shocker: Senate Democrats Admit ObamaCare Will Increase Premiums“
