Colorado Insurers: Health Care Bill Will Cause System to Collapse

Colorado health insurers made the mistake of support the concept of health care reform before they knew what the details were. Now that they've seen a goals of the bill, they're raising a very late alarm:

Colorado insurance executives, cautious supporters of health care reform throughout the past year, are now warning that current proposals could cause a "system collapse."

At issue are what insurance companies consider absurdly low penalties for people who choose not to buy health insurance.

Their concern: People will buy insurance only when they desperately need it, such as after they're diagnosed with cancer or heart disease.

Healthy people might choose to pay the penalty, now proposed at a few hundred dollars per year, because it is far less expensive than buying insurance.

Insurance companies, under that scenario, would end up spending more to treat patients than they would receive in premiums. Rates would rise even faster than they do now.

"People would come in, pay premiums for a few months while they were getting their cancer treatments," said John Martie, president and general manager of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado. "If enough people did that, the whole system would collapse.

"I would hope it wouldn't get that far. Ultimately, it would lead to rationing of care."

These guys are awfully late to the party, but most of us knew from the beginning that the goal of health care reform is the collapse of private insurers so their customers will be forced into the government program. They've had a target on their backs the whole time but never saw it.

Obama and the Democrats want single-payer government health care...period. No private insurers, no options for the citizens to go anywhere else. They claim to want to increase competition but in fact the ultimate outcome will be no competition at all.

They've built financial incentives into the bill which will encourage employers to dump their health care programs, throwing their people into the public plan, and pay a fine that's a fraction of what they had been paying in insurance premiums.

There's no mystery about what they're trying to do.