I mentioned the other day, Monday I think it was, that one aspect of the healthcare reform bill is that it actually codifies the insurance industry’s business model within the law. Holman Jenkins takes up the point in today’s Journal, and notes that the “reform” somehow manages to leave in all the problems with healthcare:
Once everyone is required by government mandate to buy insurance, the industry’s survival is no longer threatened: It can just pass its skyrocketing costs along to customers. Once customers can no longer refuse to buy the industry’s product, the problem of costs won’t be fixed, but it no longer is the insurance industry’s problem.
There, in that one sentence, we give you the failure of ObamaCare, the failure of the congressional health-care debate, the failure of health-care politics in this country.
This the most insidious and least understood part of the healthcare reform bill: in the name of “universal healthcare,” it actually further institutionalizes the insurance business model, institutionalizes a failed model, one that includes a $250 billion annual tax benefit for employer-provided insurance that masks the true costs of healthcare.
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