Georgia and eight other states are pleading with the federal government to relax the Obama-Care rule that insurers have to spend particular percentages of their premium revenue on medical care, administration, overhead and so forth.
Why are they asking for that exemption?
Well, insurers in the states are having trouble making a go of it under ObamaCare's dictation of just how much profit they can make. So they're having to consider pulling out of some states altogether. That would mean higher costs and fewer options for care for the residents of those states.
In fact, the Obama administration has already had to exempt Maine from the rule that a minimum of 80 percent of premium revenue has to be spent on medical costs and quality improvements. The second-biggest insurer in Maine, MegaLife, had said it would have to leave the state if it did not get relief from the requirement. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services admitted that MegaLife's pullout could have forced thousands of people to buy far more costly health policies from other insurers in Maine.
In Georgia, meanwhile, it is estimated that 100,000 people have policies with insurers that could be forced to leave the state because of ObamaCare's mandates, Kaiser Health News reported. That would leave them with few affordable options.
Analysts are predicting that Georgia and the other states seeking waivers - Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, New Hampshire and North Dakota - will get them because the administration doesn't want bad publicity when people can no longer afford coverage because of ObamaCare.
But doesn't that raise the obvious question of why the administration keeps having to issue one waiver after another from ObamaCare's mandates? Almost 1,400 unions, companies and other organizations already have had to get exemptions from various costly aspects of ObamaCare. The great irony is that the whole idea of the health care "reform" was to control costs and expand coverage. But now it is raising costs and shrinking coverage. How is that an improvement?
Is it any wonder that a majority of the states are suing to have unconstitutional ObamaCare overturned? For the sake of the American people and our Constitution, we hope they succeed.