Editorial: Costs are soaring

Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges were supposed to be a win-win. As the president assured the nation time and time (and time) again, not only would the Affordable Care Act help health insurers boost business, but millions of Americans who couldn’t afford medical insurance would finally be covered.

Unfortunately, reality continues to intrude.

Yes, the number on uninsured has declined. That’s no surprise given that the law includes penalties for those without health coverage and offers taxpayer subsidies for the poor. But six years after Democrats rammed the measure through Congress with no Republican votes, a growing list of the country’s insurance companies are experiencing staggering financial losses and threatening to pull out of the exchanges.

The latest, Aetna, has seen more than $300 million in losses tied to Obamacare. As a result, company officials have canceled expansion plans and will re-evaluate their future participation in exchanges across 15 states. Other private insurers, including Humana, UnitedHealth Group, Blue Cross and Anthem, face similar difficulties.

Fox News reports that Blue Cross lost $715 million in North Carolina, Tennessee and Arizona alone.

It’s hard to generate much sympathy for their plight — industry executives, after all, were among the biggest cheerleaders for Obamacare. The allure of millions of healthy, young Americans compelled to buy coverage drove their enthusiasm. In fact, though, the vast majority of new enrollees have turned out to be lower-income people in poor health who require costly care.

Things are just as bad for the co-ops that were supposed keep insurers competitive, as 70 percent, including the one in Nevada, have closed due to financial problems — and there’s not much hope for those that remain.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press reported Friday that Medicaid expansion costs are exploding, “raising questions about a vital part” of Obamacare. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently told Congress that the cost of using federal subsidies to lure states to expand the program was $6,366 per person in 2015, almost 50 percent higher than promised.

“We were told all along that the expansion population would be less costly,” George Mason University health economist Brian Blase told the wire service. “They are turning out to be far more expensive.”

The notion that Obamacare would lower health-care costs has, not surprisingly, been revealed as an elaborate fraud. States such as Nevada that bought into the Medicaid expansion plans can expect to hemorrhage cash once the federal seed money runs out. At the same time, private insurers — faced with the demographic realities of the health exchanges — will have no choice but to keep raising premiums or exit the market completely leaving taxpayers to pick up the slack.

Cynics might believe that this was the ultimate goal of Obamacare in the first place as a back-door means of moving the country closer to the progressive dream of government-run health care. Maybe. But the law’s many failures highlight the need for fewer bureaucratic interventions in the health-care marketplace, not its wholesale destruction.