Reach For The Sky

- Four weeks ago

Today:

The state’s largest insurer has been approved to raise health premium rates by 41% to 47% for some of its policies sold to individual buyers, in the largest price hikes yet seen in Connecticut since the adoption of national health care reform.

For all of its individual market plans, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has received approval to raise rates by at least 19% — including a range of 30% to 44% for the brand of plans in the individual market that was most popular in 2009, Century Preferred.

The reason for the increases is the new federal health reform mandates, according to Anthem and the state Department of Insurance, which is defending its approval against charges by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. Those reforms took effect September 23.

As Ensign Ed highlights, Connecticut insurance carriers are being exceedingly blunt about the reason for these gaping increases:

“Our [ObamaCare] compliant individual products include expanded benefits such as elimination of lifetime dollar maximums, no cost share for preventive coverage, and extension of dependent coverage to age twenty-six. With this enhanced coverage, pricing levels have also been adjusted to make sure that the cost of claims incurred is offset by the premiums collected, and that we anticipate the cost of future, expected claims. Low cost low benefit plans experienced a higher rate adjustment because with the health care reform provisions the plans now offer richer benefits. Other plans that already offered rich benefits did not experience as much of an adjustment.”

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield don't have any choice but to do this - not if they want to stay in business.  You want these stupendous premium hikes to go away?  Repeal ObamaCare as a downpayment.  It's as simple as that.

Or, for you wags out there, "Risk is no longer their business".

Curiously, HHS Oberfuehrer Kathleen Sebelius didn't issue fresh blustering authoritarian threats, but instead has gotten her Obaminet department directly (and illegally) into the propaganda business:

The Obama administration has spent approximately $3 million on TV ads discussing the benefits of health care reform this month – three times what was spent by pro-reform candidates and groups but almost nothing compared to the $21 million spent on anti-reform ads. The Department of Health and Human Services insists that the ads are not political and that the spending is in line with what the agency has done in the past to advise seniors about the open enrollment period for Medicare Advantage and prescription drug coverage plans, which begins November 15. But the ads discuss benefits specific to the Democrats’ health care reform law, such as the closing of the prescription drug “doughnut hole,” the 50% discount on drugs purchased in the coverage gap and the new coverage for an annual wellness visit, Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services spokesman Tony Salters said.

Annnnnnd this "ad buy" just happens to be running in the last three weeks before the midterm election.  What an ASTONISHING, SERENDIPITOUS coincidence, huh?  Talking about terrifying Grandma.

Of course, an unpopular regime pushing propaganda for an unpopular health care nationalization jam down on a people already incensed BY that jam down doesn't strike me as an overly sound propaganda strategy.  But it probably beats secret police raids of Anthem Blue Cross headquarters in the dead of night.

That, though, isn't our cautionary tale of the day:

“Obviously, I’m in favor of anything we can do to stop [ObamaCare], to halt it, but the problem we have is, [Obama] has to sign those bills. I get this question every single day, ‘If you take back Congress, you have the power of the purse, just defund the thing.’ Well, yeah, technically speaking, we can put riders in appropriations bills that say, ‘No such funds can go to HHS to do x, y, or z in implementing ObamaCare.’ He’s gotta sign those things. And he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would sign those things. And so that means we go to a continuing resolution or something like that. So I see a lot of stalemate - not over just whether we defund ObamaCare and cap and trade and FinReg or whatever - because he’s not going to agree to our spending levels anyway. We’re going to cut spending way below where he would go. So I don’t see him signing our spending bills, which are the bills you’d have to pass into law to defund ObamaCare.”

I wonder how many Tea Party types who think that we're just going to steamroll right over the top of Barry O on all this stuff realize how spot-on target the next House Budget Committee Chairman really is.  Or remember what happened to the last Republican Congress to get so triumphalistically carried away.  We'll have majorit(ies?) control of Congress back, but the same narcissistic, Marxist-Alinskyist zealot who forced O-Care on us in the first place won't yield an inch in his veto-wielding defense of his totalitarian "accomplishments".  And don't forget that even if we get the Senate back along with the House, it won't be by much, and the Dems will still be able filibuster any repeal or defunding attempt.  The best we can hope for is that Cap'n Awesome's "transformational" forced march into utopian servitude will be brought to a screeching halt, and that we ALL understand that, just as we didn't get into this calamity in a single election cycle, we're not going to get out of it in just one election either.

Or the same TPE naifs who wouldn't listen to reason in Delaware and threw away a gimmie Senate seat pickup (and possibly majority control along with it) will condemn Paul Ryan as a "RINO/Ruling Class" sellout and rise up in fury to drive out the GOP majority they just got through putting in, the Republican Party will be totally destroyed, Obama will be re-elected, the Democrats will be in power forever, and America will be doomed.

I'd like to think we could all understand how much is at stake, and how devastating such myopic short-sightedness will be to the Repeal cause.  Then I think of Stalingrad on the Delaware, and that it's Mitt "RomneyCare" Romney's "turn" at the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, and I realize that La Niña isn't necessary to keep me in chills long after November's glory.