Just as Barack Obama expected health insurance companies to continue offering policies that ObamaCare made impossible to offer, he now expects these companies to magically renew already-cancelled policies—but only for a year. The Washington Post summarizes his November 14 speech:

Obama said insurance companies could continue for another year to offer health plans sold to individuals and small businesses that do not meet requirements under the new law that set minimum standards for the benefits that policies must cover.

Obama’s remarks demonstrate that he has no idea how businesses operate. To cancel (or prepare to cancel) the policies of millions of policyholders in order to comply with ObamaCare, insurers had to undergo the enormous cost of (among other things) evaluating their plans’ compliance with the law, formulating various plans of action, notifying (or preparing to notify) the policy holders, and fielding the overwhelming correspondence (phone calls, emails, etc.). Now Obama expects these insurers to reverse the cancellations, notify the policy holders about the changes, deal with the resulting mass confusion, and then reverse course again within a year—all while subject to the arbitrary, continually changing whims of the politicians and bureaucrats implementing, unimplementing, and reimplementing the law.

As the Washington Post reports, among the “slew of new questions” raised by Obama’s speech is “whether insurers would adjust.” Obviously they must “adjust” as well as they can, as required by law—and then, of course, Obama will continue to blame the insurance companies for any additional complications that ensue.

It is uncanny how accurately Ayn Rand anticipated the behavior of Obama and his ilk in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged:

Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue—of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill—is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, nonprofit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: “How?”—they answer with righteous scorn that a “how” is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is “Somehow.”

Obama expects producers to “adjust” to his whims “somehow.”

But producing values—including good health insurance—requires intense focus on reality and an exacting use of reason. If Americans want good, affordable health insurance, they must demand that their representatives repeal the massively destructive, rights-violating law known as ObamaCare and free the businessmen who are capable of producing and delivering these goods.

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Creative Commons Image: Austen Hufford

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