The Patriot Post® · Obama Sandbags ObamaCare Insurers
How bad is ObamaCare? Democrats have found an election-year scapegoat in insurance giant Aetna. Now, to be sure, insurance giants are hardly innocent bystanders. They sought ObamaCare because they saw an opportunity to make money off of people now forced to buy their product. As David Harsanyi notes, “Any giant regulatory scheme bringing together big business and big government inevitably leads to cronyism and corruption.” But it was a Faustian bargain, and these companies are paying the price. After losing $430 million on the exchanges since 2014, Aetna, the nation’s third largest insurer, announced this week it’s pulling out of most of the exchanges nationwide. What did the Obama administration do? The Wall Street Journal reports:
> This week the Administration also released a July 5 letter from Aetna in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Democrats claim the document shows CEO Mark Bertolini conditioning Aetna’s ObamaCare cooperation on merger approval.
> This is some gall. Aetna was answering a June 28 “civil investigative demand,” in which Justice’s antitrust division specifically asked how blocking the merger would “affect Aetna’s business strategy and operations, including Aetna’s participation of the public exchanges related to the Affordable Care Act.”
> Soliciting sensitive internal information that Aetna is legally compelled to provide — and then making it public to sandbag the company — is the behavior of political plumbers, not allegedly impartial technocrats. If police tried this, it’d be entrapment.
Aetna isn’t the only one abandoning ship, either. Many smaller companies simply can’t compete, and are abandoning the exchanges right and left. In 2017, this will leave people in nearly a quarter of U.S. counties access to just one or two insurance plans. How’s that for “universal coverage”?
For your information or edification: Listen to Ronald Reagan on socialized medicine:
And then listen to Barack Obama on [keeping your health care plan: