Once again, the movement to expand government-run health care continues apace. No sooner had one think tank published a paper calling for the return of an individual mandate at the federal level than the liberal Commonwealth Fund published a paper, released on Friday, calling for states to impose their own Obamacare-style mandates at the state level.
However, the paper proves most interesting for what it tacitly admits. Over time, Commonwealth believes that more and more people will purchase coverage solely due to a government order—because health costs and premiums will continue to rise. Because Obamacare failed to control health costs, more and more individuals will purchase health coverage only under the threat of government-imposed taxation. That’s Commonwealth’s version of health “reform.”
Ironically, the report comes on a week when Congress took steps to undo one state-level mandate before it ever takes effect. I had noted earlier this week that Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL), in response to my reporting on the District of Columbia’s health insurance mandate, proposed an amendment to the DC appropriations bill defunding the measure.
Late Wednesday evening, the House of Representatives adopted the amendment by a 226-189 vote. Next week, the Senate could take up its version of the District of Columbia appropriations bill. If a similar amendment passes on the Senate floor, then the final version of the appropriations measure likely will contain the defunding language—thus preventing individuals who do not buy “government-approved” health coverage from having their property seized by DC authorities.
Longer-Term Effects of the Mandate
As to the Commonwealth report itself: It concludes that enacting an individual mandate in all 50 states would increase insurance coverage by roughly 3.9 million in 2019. Nearly half of those individuals (1.7 million) would comprise individuals purchasing unsubsidized exchange coverage—the people for whom Bill Clinton said Obamacare was the “craziest thing in the world,” because they don’t receive subsidies (which might explain why they won’t purchase insurance unless the government taxes them for not doing so). Individuals enrolling in Medicaid (600,000), subsidized exchange policies (1.1 million), and employer plans (450,000) comprise the rest of the coverage gains.
Particularly noteworthy however: In 2022—just four years from now—the mandate will lead 7.5 million people to obtain health coverage, or nearly twice the 2019 total. Commonwealth explains the reasoning:
As health care costs get more expensive relative to incomes over time, fewer people tend to purchase insurance and the number of uninsured rises. However, with an individual mandate in place, the effect of health care cost growth is lessened because more people hold on to their insurance to comply with the mandate. As a result, the effect of the individual mandate on reducing the number of people without insurance increases over time in percentage terms.
In other words, as health costs, and therefore premiums, continue to skyrocket, fewer people can afford coverage, and more and more people will buy coverage only if government forces them to do so. (I bet those people would take umbrage with Commonwealth’s claim that forcing them to buy coverage they cannot afford “lessens…the effect of health care cost growth.”) That’s Commonwealth’s vision for the future—government exerting more and more control on its citizens.
Wasn’t Obamacare Supposed to Reduce Health Costs?
The obvious question: Why would health care costs continue to “get more expensive relative to income over time”? Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to fix all that?
Recall that during his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly promised that his health plan would cut families’ premiums by $2,500 per year. Commonwealth provided some of the intellectual firepower behind the pledge, releasing in 2007 a report that it claimed could save $1.5 trillion in health expenditures over 10 years. Many of that report’s proposals, although not all (limiting Medicare’s coverage of expensive drugs and treatments being an obvious exception), made their way into the measure that became Obamacare.
In 2013, Commonwealth upped the ante, releasing another report whose recommendations promised $2 trillion in lower health spending over a decade. Yet Commonwealth’s report released Friday admits that health costs in 2022 will continue to rise faster than income, resulting in more and more people feeling squeezed to afford coverage. At this rate, Commonwealth should stop putting out reports talking about all the health costs we could save. Our country can’t afford them.
The Left’s Arrogant Conceit
The same premise underpins both Commonwealth’s paper on state insurance mandates and its proposals to “reduce” health costs: Just give us more power, and we’ll solve all your problems for you. Yet those problems never actually seem to go away. In 2009, Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate and a huge margin in the House, so they could enact whatever health care policies they wished—and did just that. Yet for Commonwealth and the Left, it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.
I’ll give the last word to—of all people—Barack Obama. In 2010, he talked about how he didn’t want to “give the keys back” to people who “didn’t know how to drive.” The Commonwealth report makes plain that despite all the intrusions on freedom Obamacare included, it didn’t accomplish its supposed goal of making health care more affordable. (And no, using government to re-distribute money doesn’t qualify as making the underlying cost of care more “affordable.”)
Given that dynamic, who would want to give people like the researchers at Commonwealth even more control over the health care system? The question should answer itself.
