September 15, 2010 10:00AM

ObamaCare: a Downward Spiral of Rising Costs and Deteriorating Quality

By Michael F. Cannon

Here’s my contribution to a “one‐minute debate” on ObamaCare in the Christian Science Monitor:

The new health‐care law’s mandates are already causing health insurance premiums to rise 3 to 9 percent more than they otherwise would. Its price controls are pushing insurers to abandon the market for child‐only coverage and will soon begin rationing care to Medicare patients, partly by driving nearly 1 in 6 hospitals and other providers out of the program.

Starting in 2014, when the full law takes effect, things will get really ugly. ObamaCare’s “individual mandate” will drive premiums even higher – assuming the courts have not declared it unconstitutional, as they should. Because the penalty for violating the mandate is a fraction of those premiums, healthy people will wait until they are sick to buy coverage, driving premiums higher still. This is already happening in Massachusetts, which enacted a nearly identical law in 2006. ObamaCare’s price controls will force insurers to cover sick patients at artificially low premiums, guaranteeing that insurers will avoid, mistreat, and dump the sick, because that’s what the price controls reward. ObamaCare’s private health‐insurance subsidies will expose low‐wage workers to implicit tax rates higher than 100 percent, potentially trapping millions in poverty.

With real reforms like Medicare vouchers and large health savings accounts, and letting consumers purchase health insurance across state lines, a free market would reduce costs and improve quality through innovations such as integrated health systems, nurse‐practitioner‐staffed primary care clinics, telemedicine, and insurance that offers even sick patients a total satisfaction guarantee.

But until Congress or the courts discard ObamaCare’s mandates, price controls, and new entitlement spending, there is literally nothing that can arrest this downward spiral of rising costs and deteriorating quality.