By Tribune-Review

Published: Friday, January 25, 2013, 9:08 p.m.
Updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2013

ObamaCare's negative consequences — sharply higher premiums, lower payments to treatment providers, reduced access — are looming so predictably that they can't be called “unintended.”

Physician Scott Gottlieb, an American Enterprise Institute resident fellow, writes for Forbes about a California insurance broker who sells health plans to individuals and small businesses. She's “prepping her clients for a sticker shock” this fall when insurers will unveil how they'll cope with ObamaCare's full brunt.

He says they're “hinting to her that premiums may triple” — and that double-digit hikes are likely nationwide.

Dr. Gottlieb notes that ObamaCare empowers state regulators to block such premium increases and created a federal agency to oversee rates. But the regulators are mum on what's looming. He says that's because it's all part of ObamaCare's design, which doesn't increase efficiency or competition.

If regulators force insurers to price coverage below what it costs under ObamaCare, insurers will lose money and leave markets — hence the coming hikes. Washington's notion of controlling costs will be cutting payments to providers until they “fall below the rates where things will be readily supplied,” he says.

That's similar to what happened under Massachusetts' health care “reform,” the model for ObamaCare's architects. They've known of its inevitable, anything-but-unintended consequences all along. And, soon, we'll all pay a stiff price indeed for the latest government overreach, courtesy of the Nanny State.

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