He must have looked the camera right in the eye a dozen or more times and said some variation of "Your rates will go down" if congress passes the health insurance reform bill. The president even accused the Republicans of lying about the rate increases that everyone above the age of 5 and could count to 10 knew was coming.
Well, the rate increases are here and the Democrats are acting surprised - so much so that they are proposing price controls on insurance premiums as their "pushing the cost curve down" plan has already gone up in flames.
The Wall Street Journal:
In now-they-tell-us hearings on Tuesday, the Senate health committee debated a bill that would give states the power to reject premium increases that state regulators determine are "unreasonable." The White House proposed this just before the final Obama- Care scramble, but it couldn't be included because it violated the procedural rules that Democrats abused to pass the bill.Some 27 states currently have some form of rate review in the individual and small-business markets, but they generally don't leverage it in a political way because insolvent insurers are expensive for states and bankruptcies limit consumer choices. One exception is Massachusetts: Governor Deval Patrick is now using this regulatory power to create de facto price controls and assail the state's insurers as cover for the explosive costs resulting from the ObamaCare prototype the Bay State passed in 2006.
National Democrats now want the power to do the same across the country, because they know how unrealistic their cost-control claims really are. Democrats are petrified they'll get the blame they deserve when insurance costs inevitably spike. So the purpose of this latest Senate bill is to have a pre-emptive political response on hand.
It does no good to say "I told you so." The Democrats will simply attack "greedy insurance companies" and further regulate an industry already regulated to the "nth" degree. But if the GOP were smart, they would create a commercial or two with the president promising lower insurance rates juxtaposed next to a graph showing the skyrocketing cost of insurance.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
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