Is Orrin Hatch is Busting His Butt to Save Obamacare?

UPDATE: One of Hatch’s staffers has issued the following statement: “Chairman Hatch has never supported or will support targeted policies like risk corridors that act as special bailout mechanisms in Obamacare. He has been very clear that any repeal or delay of harmful Obamacare policies should not have special carve-outs.” (emphasis in original.) An encouraging sign. As with all terrible zombie ideas, it’s never time to breathe a sigh of relief until the corpse is in several pieces and probably on fire.

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Right now, Obamacare is collapsing under its own weight. Because liberals are incapable of understanding what motivates human behavior, they passed a major overhaul of the nation’s entire health industry that made the provision of health insurance completely untenable. With exchanges failing left and right, and the nation’s top insurer vocally considering backing out of providing Obamacare plans because they are costing millions of dollars, the entire system set up by Obama and the Democrats is on the verge of total failure.

The last domino to fall in the collapse of Obamacare will be widespread refusal of private insurers to participate in the program, which is on the verge of happening.

Reports are filtering out right now, however, that [mc_name name=’Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’H000338′ ] is here to save Obama and the Democrats from this total embarrassment and to prop up Obamacare with more of your tax dollars. Via Phil Kerpen, Hatch has now included in negotiations with Democrats a provision that they are seeking that will guarantee, with federal dollars, that private insurers will not lose money due to providing Obamacare plans. (Note: Some sources are indicating that the Dems have asked and the GOP merely said no – we will see when the final bill is out. This being a Politico-sourced story, we also can’t rule out it having been made up completely).

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In other words, Obamacare itself is fiscally completely unsound, but Hatch might be negotiating with the Democrats to make sure that it can stay afloat forever thanks to what will surely be a widening flow of taxpayer dollars.

Mark this down – if the Democrats are able to include this in the current bill, Obamacare will have basically become Medicare/Medicaid for the whole country. Insurance companies will have little or no motive to actually price plans in accordance with their market value because if they underprice them the government will just pay to make up the difference. Likewise, they will face political pressure from Democrats to keep prices artificially low so that Obamacare might eventually become less unpopular. In the end, the Democrats don’t care about spending your tax dollars, after all.

It’s a very short hop from this position to the complete assimilation of the private health insurance market by the government in which the government just pays a company that is basically wholly captive to the government a set rate to manage a given population like it does in many places for Medicaid.

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And [mc_name name=’Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’H000338′ ] will have been the one responsible for making that happen.

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