Lefty States Impose Insurance Mandates Ahead of Trump's Obamacare Rollback

P. Gardner Goldsmith | June 15, 2018
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Never underestimate the roach-like power of economically ignorant leftists to dart around impending legislative failure and conjure up new ways to control our lives. Americans railed against the Obamacare health insurance mandate, and Donald Trump pushed for its repeal. Hence, it officially will be gone at the start of 2019, but...

As Raven Clabough reports for The New American, both the patchouli-infused legislature of Vermont and the Democrat-controlled Politburo of New Jersey voted last month to mandate that every adult in the state must own health insurance, thus imposing on a state level what President Obama and the Dems imposed on the U.S., and which Donald Trump subsequently pushed to repeal.

Why, you might ask, would “representatives of the people” force those “people” to do something that the “people” could do themselves if they wanted to and could afford it? Two reasons.

First, the idea that any “representative” body actually represents anyone is mathematically impossible. The only way one can be “represented” is if one represents himself as a party to a real contract, or one voluntarily engages a person to represent him in such a contract. The state, in its generic form, is not a valid contractual entity. It is imposed involuntarily. This is simply a fact. So there is no "representation" and it's all force.

Second, the VT “representatives”, their RINO governor, Phil Scott, and the anti-freedom NJ gang know that both the Obamacare and their own state insurance statutes impose what is called “Guaranteed Issue” on health insurance companies, forcing the business owners to offer health insurance policies to people who are already ill. This pushes prices up...

Any time one hears about a government imposing a mandate on citizens to buy health insurance, it will take him milliseconds on a search engine to pinpoint confirmations that said state already imposed “Guaranteed Issue” mandates on businesses and pumping up prices. I’ve been writing about this since 1995, seeing it happen in state after state, and you won’t see one without the other.

Why?

Because, on the practical level, “Guaranteed Issue” mandates force insurance companies to offer insurance to folks who are already sick, thus destroying the definition of “insurance”, and making it state-imposed health coverage, not a hedge against liability, which is what “insurance” is supposed to be. These state impositions then inspire young, relatively healthy, people to wait until they fall ill to buy their insurance, thus removing the “clean” premiums they would pay, and making the pool of insureds relatively sicker and older. This forces up costs for the insurance companies, which, in turn, prompts them to have to raise rates.

This has the secondary effect of prompting slightly older people in the market to reconsider whether they will get insurance or wait until they fall ill. Imagine forcing home insurers to have to pay to homeowners who buy policies while they are watching their homes burn down, or fill with flood water. Would there be much incentive for other homeowners to buy insurance until they have a problem?

This second-tier in the health insurance market often sees many drop their policies, and costs spiral upward, on and on. It has happened in state after state, as many of their “representative bodies” and governors pushed “Guaranteed Issue” mandates that were composed by people in Washington, D.C. and disseminated to select politicians in the various states. Take a look at Ohio, Kentucky, New York, and NH, and you will see the same thing, almost word-for word, pop up in their legislative records during the Nineties, and they all saw the same results, spiking costs and decreases in the number of people under 35 years of age who voluntarily purchased health insurance.

In New Hampshire, then-state Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s SB711 saw six of the ten companies issuing individual policies leave the state the day her bill became law. The next year, two more left. Rates increased 209% in two years, and the number of people under 35 who had insurance went down by 40%. I know because I got the study on it, and presented the numbers to Mrs. Shaheen who had in the interim become Governor. She claimed “there are new numbers”, even though the study was only thirty days old.

So for the next five months, I called her insurance department every few weeks to find out what those numbers were, until finally, one honest acolyte of the now-U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen admitted, “You’re right. There are no new numbers.”

And guess what happened in NJ and VT when they imposed “Guaranteed Issue”? Yep. Rates skyrocketed. As a study of “Guaranteed Issue” shows, in New Jersey:

From 1996 through 1998, carriers with small market shares were raising rates significantly (in one instance, by 415% over the two years), losing enrollment, and exiting the market… By 2000, only one small market share carrier remained.

After Vermont passed a “Guaranteed Issue” mandate in 1992, the state saw double-digit premium increases year upon year upon year, and, yeah, you guessed it, despite the economy booming, the number of people with policies witnessed...

…a 17% decline in covered lives in the individual market from 1994 to 1997.

So of course these busybodies in VT and NJ will follow the blowhards in Massachusetts, where purchase mandates have been on the books for years.

They don’t seem to care about economics, they don’t appear to care about freedom, and they certainly don’t care that the US Constitution already forbids this kind of thing through the Contract Clause, which prohibits any state from interfering in private contract.

That would mean that, if the politicians on the state level and the politically appointed judges on the federal level would bother following their supposed “rulebook”, the states cannot tell insurance companies and their clients what kinds of policies they can buy and sell, and the states cannot force people to form contracts with anyone.

But since they already presuppose your acquiescence to the nonexistent and farcical “social contract” that you never signed, but which they so often claim mandates that you follow the diktats of the government, there is no reason in Heaven or on Earth to think they will change their stripes now.

Unless judges who understand the concept of self-ownership and the supposed rules of the Constitution are on the benches, and unless the majority of the public learns something about ethics and economics, it’s unlikely that these state impositions will change.

They’ll just keep making state economies sicker.

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