#Obamacare and no cost controls coming home to roost

Even without the factoring in of planned, proposed, or passed mergers of health insurers, they want to stick it to "the man" — the federal government, namely, your and my tax dollars at end – with Obamacare premium increases of 20-40 percent.

The problem is, though, that "the man" on controlling insurance rate increase requests is state insurance departments. Not only did the thoroughly neoliberal and Internet 2.0 Obama insist that "the market," through techie things such as electronic patient records, would control costs (Note: EPR hasn't), he refused to put in other costs controls, like a federal bureau of insurance regulators inside HHS.

Speaking of, here's Dear Leader on that:

President Obama, on a trip to Tennessee this week, said that consumers should put pressure on state insurance regulators to scrutinize the proposed rate increases. If commissioners do their job and actively review rates, he said, “my expectation is that they’ll come in significantly lower than what’s being requested.”

Yeah, right. This is why, two weeks ago, I blogged about the black cloud of mergers.

Does he really believe such stupidity like this, or is it more about protecting the tattered remnants of the Obamacare part of his legacy, since a good one-third of it has been put off from becoming law anyway? Probably about 50-50. And, thus, already tentatively thinking about "legacies," just as Shrub Bush is not "the worst" president in history, and arguably not even in the bottom five, Obama's arguably right at average.

Back to the main theme, though.

And, O-care suffers from everything else Americans have come to hate about health insurance, like in-network vs non-network doctors, the PITA of changing insurers and thus networks and more.

This all is why we need a single-payer health care system, but even more than "just" that, we need a British-type National Health System for full cost control.

I know, I know, a lot of Democrats don't like hearing Obamacare get bashed, and, after last week's second Supreme Court decision in its favor, would probably prefer to let sleeping dogs lie.

However, as I've noted before ,we've only implemented about two-thirds of Obamacare, and the unimplemented parts have all been put off by executive order of Dear Leader himself. We may find out that they're never going to work that well and that, at the same time, existing parts of Obamacare are in part predicated on those other parts coming into action and working well.

Finally, per the quote, shock me that an Internet 2.0 neoliberal would tout online activism — which often descends into slacktivism — as the first action on this issue. Maybe we can call that "electronic patient records 2.0."