ObamaCare has had a disastrous effect on the health insurance market in this country, and it takes a hell of a lot of nerve for this guy to stand there and say it couldn't possibly have anything to do with him

Obama on soaring health insurance premiums: 'I had nothing to do with that'

Sure, it’s classic Obama deflection. He could probably smear dog crap on the bottom of your shoe and somehow make the case that it was all because of Republicans. He is that brazen. But it’s also a classic case of something Obama shares with many other liberals - the utter failure to understand that when the government messes around with private markets, the uninvited intervention affects all aspects of the private market. Because markets work like that. Speaking in Florida, Obama insists that rising health insurance rates have nothing whatsoever to do with ObamaCare, and argues that most people get their health insurance from employer plans that are not ObamaCare plans. Thus, how can it possibly be his fault? President Barack Obama offers multiple excuses for why health insurance premiums continue to skyrocket, including blaming Republicans and insurance companies for the problems.

He complains that too many reporters spend more time discussing premium increases than explaining why he isn’t responsible for them. “No, I had nothing to do with that,” Obama said, calling it “complicated” despite the “hysteria” that was growing. . . . The president argued that most people got their health care from their jobs, insisting that Obamacare didn’t even affect their premiums or health policy changes. “These are decisions made by your employers, it’s not because of Obamacare,” he said. This is very much like when Democrats want to raise tax rates and insist it will have no effect whatsoever on economic growth, or job creation. Why, those are separate expenses! That wasn’t because of what we did! But of course it was. Money is fungible and what you do to someone’s costs in one spot will affect their ability to handle costs in all others. Health insurance companies are getting socked with record losses because they were stupid enough to get on board with ObamaCare. These are the same health insurance companies who are selling policiess to employers who buy them on behalf of their workers. What do you think is going to happen to the cost of the service overall?

Insurance is also a business that turns on the profile of risk pools. Because of ObamaCare, more people are entering these risk pools who are sick and unable to pay for services, and because of ObamaCare, more of these people are getting certain services for free, as Obama himself said in this very same speech: Obama explained that thanks to Obamacare, Americans now got free preventive care, free checkups for women, free mammograms, and allowed children to stay on their parents health care plans into their 20s. Right, and when insurers have to cover all these things for free, without the patient even contributing so much as a co-pay, what do you think that does to the cost structure of the insurance company? It puts pressure on it, that’s what, and it has to be made up elsewhere. So premiums will soar and services will be squeezed when they sell group policies to employers. Obama wants you to think that because some of these policies are not bought and sold on the ObamaCare exchange, that ObamaCare couldn’t possibly have anything to do with their costs going up. It has everything to do with their costs going up. It’s the entire reason the health insurance market has gotten so skewed. This is what liberals never understand. They think you can just pass laws saying everything has to be fair, or everything has to be free, and everything will be fair and free with no other impact on markets. And if there is an impact, it’s because people responding to the government’s meddling are bad or greedy. ObamaCare has had a disastrous effect on the health insurance market in this country, and it takes a hell of a lot of nerve for this guy to stand there and say it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with him. But it also takes a lot of ignorance about markets to turn someone into as big a socialist as Obama is.

Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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