Harsh effect of ObamaCare

The painful effects of ObamaCare socialized medicine keep piling up.

One of those negative effects has come about through a provision of ObamaCare that is "supposed" to ensure that children get the medical coverage they need. Instead, the provision is going to block an undetermined number of children in Tennessee and some other states from getting private insurance coverage at all.

Here is what happened: The new law says insurers that let families buy "child-only" policies may not deny those policies to children with pre-existing medical conditions.

That certainly sounds humane.

But the trouble is, the rule creates a perverse incentive for parents to wait until their child develops a serious medical condition before they buy insurance. After all, if an insurer may not deny a new policy to a child after he develops an illness, why would parents bother paying insurance premiums before the child becomes ill? They can spend their money on other things and then demand a policy only when the child needs costly care. But that's a bit like waiting until after you have a wreck before you buy auto insurance.

Now, sure enough, many big medical insurers - such as BlueCross BlueShield, Cigna, United Healthcare and others - have decided to head off this huge new expense by no longer offering new child-only policies at all in Tennessee and several other states.

Here is how National Review magazine put it: "Because Obamacare forces insurance companies to accept children who are already sick with pre-existing conditions on the same terms as healthy children, parents now have a strong incentive to wait until their children are sick to buy child-only policies, making the products a guaranteed money-loser for insurers ... . It is no accident that they stopped offering child-only policies on the very day the rule came into effect."

With one insurer after another in Tennessee having announced it would not write new child-only policies, a spokeswoman for BlueCross BlueShield told the Times Free Press: "We just couldn't accept the risk of being the only [insurer] in the state offering these plans. It's just not financially sustainable to have only the sickest people coming to your health plan and not balancing those folks out with healthier people in the plan."

Unfortunately, this is only one of the many harsh "unintended effects" that we have already started seeing, and no doubt will continue to see, as ObamaCare - a law that is many hundreds of pages long - takes effect over the coming years.

It is no wonder there is such strong public support for repealing it.

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