Health Insurance Premiums Skyrocket "Unexpectedly"

President Barack Obama’s top health official on Thursday warned the insurance industry that the administration won’t tolerate blaming premium hikes on the new health overhaul law.

“There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a letter to the insurance lobby.

“Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections,” Sebelius said. She warned that bad actors may be excluded from new health insurance markets that will open in 2014 under the law. They’d lose out on a big pool of customers, as many as thirty million people nationwide.

-Health Oberfuehrer Kathleen Sebelius, eight days ago

Looks like Connecticut health insurance carriers didn't get the memo - and they've got traitorous public sector accomplices:

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut requested a wide range of premium increases, which will take effect October 1st, to cover the costs of new benefits required by federal health reform. Higher prices mostly affect new members shopping for a health plan on the individual market rather than people who have group plans through an employer or some other organization.

The Connecticut Department of Insurance approved Anthem’s request without changes, including a boost of as much as 22.9% just to comply with one provision: eliminating annual spending limits per customer. But it’s unclear how much more customers will pay because of the variety of plans and the complexity of other factors, such as a person’s age.

New provisions mandated by federal law to start Thursday include allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plan until they turn twenty-six, eliminating annual and lifetime limits on the amount of money an insurer spends per customer and mandating that insurers cover the full cost of preventive services, such as mammograms and colonoscopies.

The looming question is how much those new mandated benefits, along with rising medical costs, will raise prices for health insurance next year. Insurers will submit a new batch of rate requests in October and November to take effect in 2011.

Ah, but you know those knuckle-dragging neocon Bushkin wingnut "red" state Connecticuters.  Those Teabagger fascist nutb.....what?  You say Connecticut is a "blue" state?  An Obamunist bastion?  But....but....Oberfuehrer Sebelius ORDERED insurance carriers to CUT premiums.  How could a staunchly "progressive" state government possibly flagrantly disobey The One like that?  I've got to sit down for a minute.....

Well, something so unheard of, so outrageous, so sacrilegeous could NEVER happen in California, right?:

Aetna, Inc. has gotten the green light to raise premiums, making it the last of California's four major insurers to be cleared for rate hikes by state regulators.

The Department of Insurance approved the move Friday, allowing Aetna to raise rates an average of 19% for 65,000 policy holders, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California and Health Net Inc. were allowed to proceed with similar increases last month. The four companies control 90% of the state's individual policies.

All the hikes take effect October 1.

Y'see, in the real world, where insurance carriers operate, and state insurance regulators sort of exist, when you have massive additional costs forced on you by the federal government due to unfunded mandates, fascistically regimenting you into a de facto agency of the State, without the State's police power with which to confiscate resources from targeted victims, you have no choice but to raise the source of your revenues - premiums - in order to stay in business.  In other words, it is an economic decision.  Because (ta da!) there's no such thing as a free lunch.

But in the world of Barack Obama and his hardLeft ivory tower ideologists and theoreticians, there's no such thing as economics, and therefore EVERY decision made by EVERY entity or individual is political by definition.  Hence Oberfuehrer Sebelius's Gestapoesque memo to private insurance carriers.  In her mindset, reducing costs, and therefore premiums, can simply be commanded and the results will magically appear if those taking her orders simply shut up and do what they're told.  And if carriers insist that they have no choice but to raise premiums to cover the massive new costs that Sebelius insists do not exist, they're being disobedient, rebellious, and dishonest, because Godbama said costs would go down.  Period.

But no matter how hard they try, how many lying speeches Barack Obama delivers, and how much they threaten and intimidate the insurance industry to make reality conform to their fantasist ideology, the square peg of ObamaCare simply will not fit in the round hole of the pie-in-the-sky promises with which the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Axis sold it.

ObamaCare was a lie, ObamaCare was a fraud, ObamaCare was a swindle.  It does not work, the American people never believed it would work, we hate it even more now, and not even the "bluest" state governments - the #1 recipients of all The One's Hogzilla largesse - are bothering to acknowledge the White House's pathetic propaganda demands.

The only real question remaining is which will fall first: The Giant Crap Sandwich or its hapless creator.