Insurers Raising Rates: Is Health Care Reform to Blame?

“[T]he Democrats wanted to provide benefits they could tout during the election. So they tucked all these fine sounding goodies into the law to take effect early. Unfortunately, until the individual mandate kicks in (and maybe/probably even after it does), some of these provisions give people every incentive to game the system by waiting until, say, their kid gets leukemia to buy a policy… If you really think that insurance price increases have nothing to do with costs, and everything to do with insurer greed, you need to explain a few anomalies. First of all, why did insurers all suddenly get much greedier now? And if they haven’t gotten greedier, then why did they wait until the middle of a recession to impose price increases just at the time when they are most likely to cost the insurers their healthiest customers?”