In the 34 states that did not establish Obamacare exchanges, Governors nervously await a Supreme Court ruling that could throw their health insurance markets into chaos. Meanwhile, many of the Governors who did establish exchanges are regretting their decision.
More than five years after its enactment, Obamacare has proven a bitter brew for many states. Nowhere is this more evident than in health care exchanges.
Exchanges began as a figment of Washington’s imagination. The fertile minds of health policy analysts had conjured a bewildering system of cross-subsidies that involved charging young people unfairly high premiums to reduce premiums for older workers, overcharging healthy people to subsidize unhealthy ones, taxing middle income people to subsidize lower-income people (what the President likes to call “middle class economics”), cutting Medicare to enlarge Medicaid, taxing the uninsured for being uninsured, taxing employer-sponsored health plans and taxing employers for not sponsoring health plans, all garnished with tens of billions in new taxes on medicines, medical “devices” (everything from tongue depressors to defibrillators) and, of course, on health insurance itself.
