Planning to Fail, ObamaCare Edition

An old saying reminds us that when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But the opposite is also true: if you plan to fail, you fail to plan. If the success of a project is not important to you, if you secretly hope that it will fail, then you will not be bothered to exercise the due diligence necessary to make it succeed.

Does this explain the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare? Was the system designed to fail from the beginning?

ObamaCare has always been based on an untenable contradiction. President Obama's rhetoric when he pushed through his signature law was laced with hatred and contempt for the health insurance industry—yet the law itself establishes a vast new government-run marketplace for health insurance.

But if you look at the structure of this marketplace, you can see how its design is built to create a "death spiral" for private health insurance, leading many of us to predict that this would be its result. As I wrote shortly before the law was passed:

We can claim some grim vindication for these predictions with the news of hundreds of thousands of people being booted off of their existing insurance plans...

"The ACA was supposed to fail slowly and painfully over the course of two or three or four presidential election cycles (which is why Obamacare's namesake, Barack Obama, saw to it that it wouldn't be implemented until the second half of his second term). When the backlash came, it was supposed to come on some other president's—preferably a Republican president's—watch.

Yes the Democrats designed the ACA too well for their purposes.

They designed the ACA so as to make it very difficult for the Health Insurance Companies to make a profit. But what they ended up doing is making it all but impossible to make a profit in Health Insurance. So you have insurance companies cancelling policies in states all across the country where they have deemed it likely that they will suffer unacceptable loses.

As this article states they leaving individual insurances policy holders to the ACA. High Risk cases will be dumped on the ACA driving up the cost of policies or making the ACA operate at a loss (or both). The only way that the ACA will be able to attract policy buyers is to raise subsidies to astronomical heights; which means the tax payer will be footing the bill for the high risk pool of health insurance buyers.

What we will have is the next Amtrak or US Post Office; a money loosing quazi private company that is a drain on the Federal budget that could be more efficiently run by the private sector.

But of course the only solution the Democrats will ever accept is to pump more and more money in to the bottomless pit. And of course the other inevitable result of this new adventure in Socialist failure is that the Republicans in congress will only briefly protest and then acquiesce to the Democrats pointless solution that will of course fail and need to be repeated endlessly.

At the point where the health insurance companies were told to accept anyone with a pre-existing condition into the general pool, it was guaranteed to sink an industry that lives or dies by actuarial risk assessment. It immediately converted them to scapegoats who were ordered to deplete their resources until bankrupt, whereupon they might be bailed out (to remain as a front organization for further government redistribution) or just disappear.

What is being put up is not a viable "insurance" model, but is just designed to look like one.

Obama is managing to fundamentally transform the insurance industry, similar to the way the auto industry bail-out, false bankruptcy scam set aside business contract law.

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