USA Today reported yesterday that insurance rates on Obamacare exchanges are threatening to surpass the “high and wildly fluctuating rates that characterized the individual insurance market before the health law took effect.”
This means, essentially, that government intervention in the healthcare market has done nothing but exacerbate the problem it was meant to fix.
"With dramatic drops in insurance company participation on the exchanges for some states, decreased competition and other factors are leading to often jarring rate hikes," USA Today reported. "Some of the states that are facing what are likely among the biggest increases this year — Tennessee, Arizona and North Carolina — were among those the Urban Institutereported in May had the biggest increases last year."
“The reality is, it’s all very justified, unfortunately,” Iowa insurance commissioner Nick Gerhart said Thursday of the premium increases he approved this week of 19% to 43% for about 70,000 Iowans who buy their own policies.
Obamacare’s heavy-handed government mandates were designed to whip insurance companies into shape. Instead, the law has thrown a massive wrench into an already complicated system, forcing hard-working Americans to spend even more money on healthcare than they had before.
The American people know that government intervention almost always causes more problems than it solves. Unfortunately, our federal officials have yet to learn this basic economic principle, and they will never learn it by themselves. That’s why an Article V Convention of States is so critical. A Convention of States can propose constitutional amendments that force our federal officials to adhere to what all Americans know by experience: the people -- not the government -- are best able to solve their own problems.
