This is What Government-Run Health Care Looks Like

 

IBDEditorials.com

Socialized Medicine: More than two-thirds of the public don't think the government can be trusted to run the nation's health care system successfully. ObamaCare is proving these skeptics right.

The public might not agree on much these days, but one thing it overwhelmingly believes is that government is ill-equipped to manage one-sixth of the economy — 67% said so in the January IBD/TIPP poll.

This distrust has only gotten worse as the ObamaCare debacle unfolded, climbing 4 points in one month. Even Democrats — at 44%, up from 34% the month before — are increasingly skeptical.

Little wonder, since every day ObamaCare provides fresh evidence that government can't do the job.

First were the massive technological failures at the health care exchanges, millions of unexpected policy cancellations and sky-high premiums.

Then we saw the administration's frantic efforts to delay and rewrite rules to minimize political fallout.

Now, we read stories about people who thought they'd enrolled in a plan but hadn't, or were told they hadn't, or nobody seems to know for sure.

And doctors, pharmacies and hospitals are now spending countless hours trying to figure out who's covered and for what. Often, even doctors don't know if they're in an ObamaCare plan's network.

The left-wing Huffington Post tells of a cancer patient who had to put off surgery because nobody could tell whether she was covered, even through she'd enrolled via an ObamaCare exchange in December. It took intervention by the head of her state's exchange to sort it out.

Meanwhile, many plans say only 60% of signees have paid their first premium so far. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield reports that as of Jan. 3 just 8% of those who signed up with Connecticut's exchange had done so.

As a result, even though insurers pushed back payment deadlines that they'd already extended once, many of the 2 million who signed up for ObamaCare will end up disenrolled — creating yet another crisis.

On top of all this, we're learning that the industry will likely need a bailout in the near future, since the young aren't signing up as hoped. Humana, for example, announced in its latest 8-K filing it "expects the risk mix of members enrolling through the health insurance exchanges to be more adverse than previously expected."

ObamaCare conveniently provides for such a bailout through the law's "risk corridor" program, which is designed to limit industry losses in the first three years.

Confusion, bureaucracy, delays, crony capitalism, taxpayer bailouts. This is what health care under government control looks like. And this is just the beginning.