Another Obamacare benefit — insurance companies dropping child-only plans

Last week we saw the not very surprising news that insurance companies will have to raise rates to pay for Obamacare mandates when it was reported that Connecticut insurers had received approval to raise rates over 20% just to cover the cost of eliminating life-time coverage limits.  This news was accompanied by warnings that the cost increase was only to cover ONE Obamacare insurance mandate, and that additional premium hikes would be coming as other ‘benefits’ of Obamacare came on line.

This week we get the news that some health insurers have decided to stop offering child-only plans due to cost and Obamacare regulation compliance issues.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air explains:

Most of us outside of the White House understood that by forcing insurers to take on more risk while pressuring them to keep prices down, we would either see insurers stop offering certain policies or go out of business altogether.  ObamaCare advocates kept insisting that we had to help the children by proceeding apace with their government takeover of the industry.  The result?  Suffer the children:

Some of the country’s most prominent health insurance companies have decided to stop offering new child-only plans, rather than comply with rules in the new health-care law that will require such plans to start accepting children with preexisting medical conditions after Sept. 23.

The companies will continue to cover children who already have child-only policies. They will also accept children with preexisting conditions in new family policies.

Critics blast the insurers for their “immoral” decision, but they had little choice.  The federal government mandate requires them to accept any child at any time, regardless of any pre-existing condition, but doesn’t yet require parents of healthy children to buy policies for them.

There is a commercial out there that starts “this is the biggest no brainer since…” and I think that’s an appropriate phrase to use here.  Anyone that claimed this would not happen, or couldn’t have been foreseen, either had their head buried in the sand or have chosen to intentionally mislead others.

The very concept of insurance and risk pools has been ignored in the abomination law known as Obamacare.  Unless your goal is to drive insurance companies out of business (can you say single payer system?), it is not reasonable to tell insurance companies to increase coverage (no pre-existing conditions, no life time limits, etc.), but then tell them they can’t increase costs.

As opposed to the individual mandate as many Americans are, the reality is that the ONLY way that requirements such as no lifetime coverage limits and no pre-existing conditions can possibly work is to require every one in America to purchase coverage.  However, as the Obamacare law was designed to win elections in the November 2010 elections and get Obama re-elected in 2012, Pelosi, Reid and company chose to implement ‘benefits’ just before the mid-term elections, but wait until after the 2012 Presidential election to implement the unpopular aspects like the individual mandate.

Nancy Pelosi famously said that we have to pass the bill to know what’s in it, but the fact is that even now that it’s passed, most Congressmen and American citizens have not read the bill, and don’t know what’s in it.  More importantly, they still don’t understand the negative ramifications of the bill.