How #ObamaCare Raises Prices and Limits Medical Choices

Another essential analysis, at the Wall Street Journal, "ObamaCare's Plans Are Worse":

Liberals justify [ObamaCare's] coercive cross-subsidies as necessary to finance coverage for the uninsured and those with pre-existing conditions. But government usually helps the less fortunate honestly by raising taxes to fund programs. In summer 2009, Senate Democrats put out such a bill, and the $1.6 trillion sticker shock led them to hide the transfers by forcing people to buy overpriced products.

This political mugging is especially unfair to the people whose plans on the current individual market are being taken away. The majority of these consumers are self-employed or small-business owners. They're middle class, rarely affluent. They took responsibility for their care without government aid, and unlike people in the job-based system, they paid with after-tax dollars.

Now they're being punished for the crime of not subsidizing ObamaCare, even though the individual market was never as dysfunctional or high cost as liberals claim. In 2012, average U.S. individual premiums were $190, ranging from a low of $123 in North Dakota to a high of $385 in Massachusetts. Average premiums for family plans fell that year by 0.5% to $412.

Those numbers come from the 13,000 different policies from 180 insurers sold on eHealthInsurance.com, the online shopping brokerage that works. (Technological wonders never cease.) Individuals can make the trade-offs between costs and benefits for themselves. This wide variety is proof that humans don't all want or need the same thing. If they did, there would be no need for a market and government could satisfy everybody.

That is precisely what the Obama health planners believe they can do. Regulators mandated a very rich level of "essential" health benefits that all plans in the individual market must cover, regardless of cost. This year eHealth reported that its data show individual premiums must be 47% higher than the old average to fund the new categories in the individual market.

RTWT.

And then check, FWIW, Nobel Prize-winning socialist Paul Krugman, "Obamacare's Secret Success" (at Memeorandum).

Krugman's "secret success" is the claim that ObamaCare is "secretly" lowering national healthcare expenditures.

The problem, of course, is that it is doing no such thing. See the detailed analysis from Charles Blahous, for the Manhattan Institute, "NO GROUNDS FOR CLAIM THAT OBAMACARE LOWERS HEALTHCARE COSTS."