Obamacare Is Failing — On Purpose?

Could this have been the strategy to get to a single payer system?

Obamacare’s exchanges could soon be out of health insurers.

This month, UnitedHealth – the largest U.S. insurer — announced that it would no longer sell exchange plans in New Jersey in 2017. It has now withdrawn from 27 states. Last year, UnitedHealth lost about $475 million on the exchanges; this year, it’s projecting $500 million in losses.

The story is similar for other insurers. Many have decided to abandon markets they have long served. That’s left people fewer options for coverage. And with less competition on the exchanges, the plans that remain have more freedom to hike premiums.

Obamacare’s ongoing dysfunction is bad enough. But the looming collapse of its exchanges is prompting calls for even more government involvement in healthcare — even a single-payer system.

It takes a special kind of reasoning to respond to the spectacular failure of government that is Obamacare by calling for, well, even more government.

Thirteen of Obamacare’s 23 state-sponsored CO-OP health plans have failed. Consequently, no less than 740,000 people have had to scramble to find new coverage.

UnitedHealth wants to raise premiums for its exchange plans in New York 45.6%. The average rate-hike request for 2017 in the Empire State is more than 17%.

Humana has put in for a 50% jump for its “low-cost” silver plan in the Detroit metro area. If approved, a 40-year-old making $35,000 would have to pay almost $5,000 a year in premiums. And that doesn’t account for the plan’s substantial deductible.

The list goes on.

Obamacare’s supporters insist that these premium spikes don’t matter. As a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said, the final rates are “not a reliable indicator,” since Obamacare’s subsidies obscure the actual cost of a plan for many consumers.

The Obama administration promised that this wouldn’t happen. The White House said that Obamacare would “curb excessive premium growth for . . . millions of Americans.” It said that requiring uniform benefits, banning companies from denying coverage to the sick, and creating online exchanges would yield a marketplace where insurers competed on price and quality. Everyone would benefit.

But many Americans have not benefited. One in two disapproves of the law. More than half of Americans rate the coverage they’ve gotten through Obamacare as only “fair” or “poor.”

So were the expectations of Obamacare’s architects off the mark? Or did they know that the reform package would follow the historical precedent of several states — like Kentucky and New Hampshire — that unsuccessfully implemented Obamacare-like insurance regulations in the 1990s?

Some on the left seem secretly delighted that Obamacare is failing. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., has advocated replacing Obamacare — and all private insurance — with a single-payer, Medicare-for-All system. He’s pulled Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, a longtime supporter of Obamacare-style healthcare reform, closer to his point of view as well.

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