A helpful reminder: “…the dirty secret is that insurers stand to lose the most from King v. Burwell… The giant players — United Healthcare, Cigna, Aetna, Anthem and Humana — have seen stock prices double, triple, even quadruple since the law was passed in 2010. The coming ruling threatens to put an end to their gravy train.” As Betsy [McCaughey] noted elsewhere in that article, the insurance companies were more than happy to sign onto a program where they had a guaranteed – dare we say, mandated? – customer pool; and one where sweet, sweet tax revenue could be used to stitch together any gaps in this Frankenstein’s Monster* of a health care market.
Which means that health care insurers have absolutely no reason to complain that the State giveth, and the State taketh away. That’s what the State does; and the insurers took the State’s Shilling. It’s hardly our fault that this turned out to be unwise.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: A bailout of the insurance industry, by the way, would be most unwise. The Right was not in favor ofsuch a thing in 2014; we’re certainly not going to be more in love with the idea now. As Betsy [McCaughey] also noted in the above article, removing the subsidies in the federal Obamacare exchange will effectively destroy the various mandates anyway. It might be worth keeping those subsidies around temporarily in exchange for formally killing the individual/employer mandates: I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. But it’s certainly true that if King v. Burwell goes away the mandates will have to as well. One way, or the other.
*One that is, by the way, the sole fault of Democrats.
