Because price controls worked so well in the 1970s, let’s try them on health insurance!
Those of us who remember the 1970s recall the frolics sparked by America’s last great experiment with widespread price caps – namely, those on oil and natural gas. The resulting short supplies gave us the thrill of waiting in long lines – and sometimes even getting into fistfights – for the privilege of buying a few gallons of gasoline.
This is beyond stupid. It’s criminal. The rate hike that has Obama’s panties in a knot is not because Mean Evil Big Insurance hates its customers. It’s because they are regulated to a fare-thee-well, and losing customers because of the near-doubling of unemployment since the Democrats took over Congress.
It’s basic economics and common sense, not a conspiracy theory:
The logic here, which you’d think the administration would understand, is actually really simple: Make it more expensive for insurers to do business, and insurance will become more expensive. Take Massachusetts, for example, where, in the wake of ObamaCare style reform, ongoing double digit rate hikes and faster than average medical cost-growrth have incurred the wrath of the governor’s office, which is now threatening to review—and perhaps refuse—health insurance rate hikes in the state. (The one argument that insurance reform supporters have is that the state’s individual market premiums have dropped. Problem is, that’s likely a result of balancing out other regulations—and no matter what, Massachusetts’ premiums are still the second most expensive in the nation.)
But then, I don’t think very many people really believe that the Obama administration doesn’t understand this. It’s just another manufactured crisis which they are not letting go to waste.
Added: Allahpundit’s take: “They’re going to starve the beast, to borrow a line that’s suddenly back in vogue on the NYT op-ed page, and then replace it.” In other words, break the current system so thoroughly that voters demand something like the systems that already are not working in Canada and the UK. And given how few people actually vote, and how misinformed so many of those people are, it probably will work.
I’m actually surprising sanguine about this, though whether it’s my lingering habit of PTSD dissociation or just a sense of fatalism, I don’t know. Even before Obama was elected, people were making the idealogical connection between him and Carter, and talking about a do-over of the 1970s. I hated the 70s. Really hated them, for every reason you can think of and probably a lot more. Everything from the smell of polyester coming out of the dryer to my sweaty skin sticking to the car upholstery while we waited in line for gasoline for hours. The vast majority of the music (die, disco, DIE), and most of the television, though I do have a soft spot for the Carol Burnett show, was simply awful. Walter Cronkite was creepy, and the news seemed to be nothing but riots and war. I cringed during the Superbowl at how many commercials had nods to the 70s – didn’t anyone else notice that trend? And here comes Obama and his Democratic Congress, doing their damnedest to recreate that horrible decade.
