If It Walks Like A Duck And Quacks Like A Duck, It’s Probably A Duck

Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial today about the proposed plan to ‘stabilize’ the insurance market in ObamaCare. The Senate’s solution is to hand over a mere $14 billion to insurance companies.

The editorial reminds us:

The proposal, developed by Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, would restore the roughly $7 billion in annual “cost sharing reduction” subsidies paid to insurance companies through 2019.

This money is meant to offset the cost of providing plans with reduced deductibles and co-payments to low-income families. Insurers say that without the subsidy payments, they’d have to hike insurance premiums on everyone in the ObamaCare exchanges even more.

ObamaCare required lawmakers to authorize the CSR payments each year, but they never did so. The Obama administration simply paid them out anyway. But last week, President Trump announced that he was cutting off these illegal subsidy payments. By doing so, he gave Republicans some leverage to force more changes to ObamaCare; they could offer to restore them, temporarily, if Democrats agreed to some significant changes to ObamaCare.

The “compromise” Senate plan worked up by Alexander and Murray squanders that leverage.

There are some things we need to keep in mind here. ObamaCare was never intended to be successful–it was supposed to fail after Hillary Clinton became President so that she could replace it with socialized medicine (single-payer healthcare). When Donald Trump got elected, that plan went out the window. So what are the alternative plans to reach the same result? The lunatic fringe on the left wants to impeach President Trump. Some of these delusional people think that would mean that Hillary Clinton would be President. The logic of that escapes me, but I can guarantee that there is a lunatic fringe that is thinking that way. Barring that, what else can the Democrats do to give us socialized medicine? They can refuse to end ObamaCare. They can keep pouring money into ObamaCare to keep it going until a Democrat can be elected President. They can resist any legislative move that actually improves it. It seems as if all three are being or have been attempted.

I for one am glad to know that we will not be pouring $14 billion into insurance companies. Get the government out of the insurance business, let the free market and the actuary tables take over, and forget the nightmare of ObamaCare.