Thursday, March 1, 2012

Kathleen Sebelius: Private Health Insurance Market ‘In a Death Spiral’

February 29, 2012

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified before the House Ways and Means Committee with regard to health insurance and Obamacare. While she may have somewhat correctly diagnosed a problem, her “cure” includes more of the same causative factors that brought the problems about in the first place.

CNS News has video of the exchange between Sebelius and Rep. Peter Roskan (R-IL) as well as details of follow up comments by the Cabinet Secretary.

“How about when the president said you can keep your health care coverage, if you like it?” Roskam said. “And yet, the reality is, according to Bloomberg (News) at least, 9 percent fewer businesses are offering medical coverage than in 2010. There the rhetoric didn’t meet the reality, did it?”

Sebelius did not contest the numbers.

“Well again, congressman, what you’re seeing, it wouldn’t have mattered if we had passed the Affordable Care Act or not,” she said. “The private market is in a death spiral.”

Under President Obama’s health-care law, all Americans will be required to purchase a government-approved health-care plan and those earning under 400 percent of the poverty level will be eligible for a federal subsidy to do it.

Later on Tuesday, in an address to the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, Sebelius discussed the “broken” health insurance system that Obamacare aims to fix.

Sebelius said that the next “important step” in implementing the president’s health care plan is to establish “essential health benefits”–the basic package of coverage that the federal government will order all health insurance plans to cover. (Read More)


Won’t those “essential health benefits” drive up the cost of health insurance even more, putting the insurance companies in an even more precarious fiscal situation? Rather than pass laws that would make health insurance portable and affordable, the government keeps making it more expensive and hard to obtain. Of course, that’s by design. When Obamacare’s proponents are caught telling the truth, they reveal that the law was only meant to be a stepping stone to a single payer system. So everything’s going according to plan – it’s just taking a while. That’s also by design, since they want to make sure Obama gets reelected before a majority of voters begin to understand exactly what’s happened to them.

SOURCE: Lonely Conservative

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