California, which has had a long, sometimes-tortured history of trying to overhaul its health care markets, beat every other state last year when it passed a law creating a health insurance exchange – an online marketplace where millions of uninsured residents will be able to get insurance...Now the board overseeing the exchange must ensure that coverage on the exchange, which must be up and running in 2014, is affordable and easy to buy...
One problem:
“The state has no money,” Kimberly Belshe, a member of the board and secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency under former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Gee. How will they operate the exchange?
The antidote is “to get millions of people enrolled and start drawing down federal dollars on Day One,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition.
Brilliant. Democrats in action: a bankrupt state will suck money from a bankrupt federal government. Why didn't I think of that?
...Steven Lindsay, lobbyist for the California Association of Health Underwriters, which represents 2,500 insurance agents and brokers... is pessimistic. More exchanges have failed than succeeded, said Lindsay.“We do not believe that the exchange website will get significant numbers of users,” he said. “The vast majority of people who will be in the exchange don’t have a college education. Health insurance is not in their cultures. They pay for care when needed. Now we go out and say to these folks, ‘You have to give us between 3 and 9 percent of your income for insurance.’ They might not even use computers.”
He also said that the board must figure out how to get as many people as possible enrolled in the exchange, and should provide financial incentives to agents and community groups to help with the enrollment. “If you don’t get enough people to sign up,” he said, “it will fail.”
Of course it will. Central planning always fails.
Just like the old Soviet Union.
Which explains Democrats -- you know, that old definition of insanity.
1 comment:
Life on the Left requires a certain zeitgeist to sustain its members. Think high-speed rail. Absolutely no evidence that rail would ever recover the costs of development, nor that the revenue would ever meet its operating costs. But, to make things better, we have to move forward.
No money? What a plebeian consideration. It's Field of Dreams all over again. If you build it, they will come. Proof? Didn't you watch the movie?
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