ObamaCare doubles health care costs at Florida college

ObamaCare doubles health care costs at Florida college
We passed it, and found out what was in it.
by John Hayward
05/31/2012

The greatest legislative disaster of our time, ObamaCare, continues its grim march through American society, flattening astonished bystanders who were under the impression that it was going to make health care cheaper. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Fox News reports students at Clearwater Christian College in Tampa are getting walloped with a one hundred percent increase in the cost of their health care plans:

“Due to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA – commonly known as health care reform), the cost of student health insurance has doubled,” read the letter from the college’s human resources department. “In addition, most insurance carriers are hesitant to provide contracts for this insurance due to the unpredictability of the cost of the claims.”

Clearwater requires all students to have insurance – either through the college’s plan or a private plan. It’s unclear how many of the school’s 500 students will be impacted by the price hike.

The report cites the example of 19-year-old student Curtis Johnson, whose premium is skyrocketing from $600 last year to $1,330 next year. “It’s a lot of money for a college kid,” he said. “The President and the Democratic leaders in Congress championed this bill and they said it was going to lower the cost of healthcare. It’s not only raised my cost, it doubled the cost of my healthcare.”

emember the battle cry for extending taxpayer-subsidized student loan discounts? “Don’t double my rate!” Well, guess what, kids? Obama doubled your rates.

Of course, the Department of Health and Human Services had nothing to say about any of this when Fox News contacted them, beyond prattling about all the “extended benefits” students will enjoy under the law, and how they can “count on being covered by their health plan if they get sick.” Does that sound worth a 100 percent increase in premiums? Trick question – your opinion doesn’t matter.

“I remember when Nancy Pelosi said earlier that they had to pass the law to find out what was in it,” Johnson cheekily observed. “I’m sure finding out for myself what’s in this law. I really never thought it would directly affect me.”

Join the club, Curtis Johnson! Actually, you didn’t have to read ObamaCare carefully – as very few members of Congress did – to know something like this was lurking within it. This is what always happens when mandates destroy market flexibility. ObamaCare forced expensive new mandates onto people who didn’t want to pay for them. The rational decision of consumers to seek out less comprehensive coverage at lower cost was over-ridden by central planners. Healthy 19-year-old college students must pay, not only for benefits they personally aren’t interested in, but for the coverage of other people with “pre-existing conditions,” as “health insurance” completes its slow mutation into a welfare program. Everyone must buy a Cadillac, even if they would have preferred to save money by driving a Ford Focus.

Only a delusional leftist could have believed this would happen without dramatically increasing health care costs for many people. The logic of ObamaCare is to socialize health care costs, spreading them across the entire population. At the current, corporatist level of the health care takeover, this involves forcing everyone to buy health insurance from private companies, compensating them for the provision of government-mandated benefits that would otherwise quickly bankrupt them.

If the “individual mandate” didn’t exert blatantly extra-Constitutional power to compel the purchase of health insurance from these private middlemen when they’re healthy, people would wait to purchase insurance until they got sick, then invoke their right to coverage for “pre-existing conditions” at no additional charge. That would sound like a good deal to someone like Curtis Johnson. Instead, he's a victim of the basic process of socialism: providing benefits at below-market cost to some, while "socializing" the losses among others.

Barack Obama told one of the greatest lies in American political history when he promised, “If you like your coverage, you can keep it.” No, you can’t. If your provider doesn’t drop it outright, the ObamaCare mandates will force your plan to change.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.