Health Insurance Companies Controlled by Washington NOT Free Market

The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) is and always has been just a tool to gain total control of health care in this country. ObamaCare was designed and rammed down our collective throats with one purpose alone and that is to destroy the health care that we have now and replace it with a system that is controlled by a Washington bureaucracy. It is very important that everyone that watches the news about what is happening to our health care system be prepared to question what is said.

So much of the news is prepared and manipulated to change thinking, to persuade the listener that the information as the talking heads are laying them out are actual facts. Listen to their words they use to confuse and confound the listener. Never let your guard down. Question everything.

Polls are a good example of how the progressives and others disseminate "facts" they say are the rule of the day. How can these facts be wrong as they are from the 'people' them selves? What nonsense. Polls are another tool used to manipulate the narrative to suit the agenda.

The pollster can get what ever answer they want by how the frame the questions and who they ask.
It's amazing how many of the supposedly smartest people in the room fall for this crap. Worse, millions of people are more the willing to believe what ever the pollsters report as fact.

Health Insurance Was Not a Free Market Prior to ObamaCare
Source: Rituparna Basu, "The Broken State of American Health Insurance Prior to the Affordable Care Act," Pacific Research Institute, 2013.

January 29, 2014

The American health insurance market prior to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was not a free market system, says Rituparna Basu, an analyst at the Ayn Rand institute.

Many Americans believed that the U.S. health care system was a mess because health insurance companies had too much freedom -- that a free market health insurance market did not work. To remedy this, the Obama administration implemented the Affordable Care Act.
But Basu challenges the assumption that the health care market prior to the ACA was actually a free market. In fact, the U.S. health insurance system was one of the most government-controlled systems in America. From licensing requirements to finance restrictions to price dictates to coverage mandates, the health insurance market in America was hardly free:

• Prior to the ACA, 36 states imposed a "rate band" in the small group market and 11 states imposed them in the individual market. Rate bands limit the degree to which health care premiums can be based on your health status. A rate band of 20 percent, for example, means that an insurer cannot charge a premium higher or lower than 20 percent of the average premium offered. These laws mean that the young and healthy end up paying more so that older or less healthy individuals can pay less.
• States that impose community ratings do not allow insurers to take health status into account at all when charging a premium. Before the ACA, a version of community rating existed in seven states for the individual market and 11 states for the small group market. This just raises premiums for everybody, because insurers are forced to accept all applicants.
• Governments -- both state and federal -- also required coverage of certain benefits. Pennsylvania began requiring osteopathy and dentistry coverage as far back as 1949. There are more than 2,000 benefit mandates in effect today.

A real, free market for health insurance would not have included these types of controls, which only drive up costs. It was not the free market that was responsible for so many problems in our health care system, but government regulations.
Source: Rituparna Basu, "The Broken State of American Health Insurance Prior to the Affordable Care Act," Pacific Research Institute, 2013.