THE LADY NEEDS A CLUE

"Just got off the phone with my health care provider asking them to explain why my premium jumped up," Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile  tweeted.  "No good answers."

The poor lady needs a clue. 

"Health insurance companies are seeking and winning double digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for customers," wrote New York Times reporter Reed Abelson Jan. 5.

Mr. Abelson needs a clue, too.  Premiums aren’t soaring in spite of Obamacare.  They’re rising because of Obamacare.

That’s because in drafting the legislation, Democrats "ignored virtually every actuarial principle governing rational insurance pricing," Merrill Matthews and Mark Litow wrote in the Wall Street Journal Jan. 13.

"Central to ObamaCare are requirements that health insurers (1) accept everyone who applies (guaranteed issue), (2) cannot charge more based on serious medical conditions (modified community rating), and (3) include numerous coverage mandates that force insurance to pay for many often uncovered medical conditions," they said.

"Guaranteed issue incentivizes people to forgo buying a policy until they get sick and need coverage (and then drop the policy after they get well). While ObamaCare imposes a financial penalty-or is it a tax?-to discourage people from gaming the system, it is too low to be a real disincentive. The result will be insurance pools that are smaller and sicker, and therefore more expensive," Mr. Matthews and Mr. Litow said.

"The authors of Obamacare frequently admitted that the law would do nothing to reduce insurance costs," noted Avik Roy, founder of Roy Healthcare Research.

Hardest hit will be young people, because the community rating provision in Obamacare forces them to pay dramatically more for health insurance in order to partially subsidize premiums for older Americans, according to a study published in the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries.

About 80 percent of Americans below age 30 face premium increases of 40 percent or more because of the community rating provision, said the study’s authors, Kurt Giesa and Chris Carlson.

In addition, young adults in good health face premium increases of 17 to 20 percent because of Obamacare’s requirements that the healthy and the sick be charged similar rates, they said.

"Most estimates by insurance pros suggest that the totality of Obamacare will increase non-group premiums for young people by 80 to 100 percent," said Mr. Roy.

That’ll be a grim wakeup call for the twentysomethings who voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.  Adjunct professors at several colleges already have gotten theirs.

Robert Balla, who teaches English at Stark State College in North Canton, Ohio, was surprised and dismayed to learn he’ll be permitted to work no more than 29 hours a week.  This amounts to a five percent pay cut, he told the Wall Street Journal.

His hours were cut back, the college told Mr. Balla in a letter, "in order to avoid penalties under the Affordable Care Act."

This had to be done "to maintain the fiscal stability of the college," a spokeswoman for Stark State told the Journal. "There are a lot of penalties involved if adjuncts go over their 29 hours-per-week average. The college can be fined and the fines are substantial."

Families with employer-based policies had rate increases of only about 4 percent, Mr. Abelson noted. Their reprieve won’t last long.

 "If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan," Mr. Obama promised.  He was lying.  Obamacare is designed to kill employer-based insurance by making it more attractive for companies to dump their workers into exchanges.   Obamacare will push 7 million people out of their job-based insurance coverage, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in February.

Obamacare will boost the cost to the government of health care by $1.3 trillion over ten years, CBO estimated.  That’s more than the $1.2 trillion in cuts that would be forced by the sequester law the president complains so much about, noted Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.  If implementation of Obamacare were postponed, enough money could be saved to prevent the sequester cuts, he said.

If Ms. Brazile, Mr. Balla, et al ever do get a clue, Gov. Jindal’s idea could become very popular.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.