Chris Navin

From The Economist:

‘Yet the share prices of America’s five biggest health insurers—UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Humana, Cigna and Anthem—have all roughly tripled over the past five years. The big insurers have been consistently and highly profitable (see chart).’

Regulation has some winners, but it’s probably not you…

Megan McArdle on a serious problem with health-insurance:

‘Bankruptcy is terrible. But you’d probably pay a lot less for bankruptcy insurance than you would for insurance that actually made you healthier.’

Of course, this is the whole point of insurance…paying into a pool of risk to cover the losses if/when you face trouble.

The main problem with the ACA for people who think like me, is that coercion is used to round up everyone into a system that’s poorly, if not fatally, designed.

Free-lunches are on the menu, and we’re all now forced into a pact that pays for them with horrible cost/benefit ratios. If you already think there’s enough spending and taxation, regulation and back-room dealing in D.C….this law ain’t for you either:

‘You can’t really blame Obamacare for the fact that the most “affordable” insurance offers rather scanty coverage for the average user. Though of course, you can blame the law’s architects for overpromising. They should have been more honest, with themselves and with voters, about the limits of what they could actually do. But of course if they had been, the law probably would never have passed.’

Addition: Avik Roy summed it up nicely:

‘Any serious health reform program—left, right, or center—would involve some disruption of our existing health-coverage arrangements. What makes Obamacare such a deeply flawed piece of work is not that it disrupts our existing arrangements, but that it disrupts those arrangements by forcing people to buy costlier coverage.’

There are other ways to be on the ‘right-side of history,’ if what’s important to your identity is being a moral person during a time of identity politics.

We can all do better.

Still Looking For Alternatives-Charlie Martin At PJ Media: ‘Obamacare vs. Arithmetic’

Avik Roy At Forbes: ‘Democrats’ New Argument: It’s A Good Thing That Obamacare Doubles Individual Health Insurance Premiums’…Megan McArdle At Bloomberg: ‘Health-Care Costs Are Driven By Technology, Not Presidents’