EDITORIAL: Hillary plan is Obamacare 2.0

By now, you'd think Hillary Clinton would have learned enough from past mistakes to leave health care alone. You'd think the Democratic presidential candidate would have the sense to tell voters, "You punished my party in last year's election because the Affordable Care Act did precisely the opposite of what we promised, and so I vow as president to unwind this law, reduce government control of health care and make things better for struggling families."

Keep dreaming, taxpayers. The former secretary of state and U.S. senator believes Obamacare didn't go far enough in regulating health care, health insurance and medical costs. As if that weren't obvious enough from her work as first lady in 1993 to create HillaryCare, an overhaul of American medicine that would have fixed prices and prohibited doctors from exiting the system and accepting direct payments from patients for services, Mrs. Clinton this week unveiled two health care policy goals that will actually worsen the problems they're intended to fix.

Mrs. Clinton is proposing Obamacare 2.0.

The law that passed with full Democratic support and not a single Republican vote has increased Americans' health care costs, most visibly through skyrocketing deductibles and rising co-pays. Obamacare requires insurers to impose so many coverage mandates that the only way for insurers to slow the growth of premium costs is to boost out-of-pocket expenses. Millions of households barely utilize their expensive insurance because they don't have the income or savings to cover deductibles that can reach $5,000 per family per year. A Kaiser Family Foundation study released earlier this year found that a quarter of all insured nonelderly Americans can't afford a mid-range deductible of $1,200 for an individual and $2,400 for a family. Kaiser reports deductibles have increased 67 percent since Obamacare became law in 2010.

The solution is obvious: Reduce federal coverage mandates to reduce premiums and deductibles. Instead, Mrs. Clinton wants even more mandates that are guaranteed to make premiums and deductibles rise even higher.

First, on Tuesday in Iowa, Mrs. Clinton released her plan to make prescription drugs more "affordable." (Sound familiar?) She proposes capping patients' monthly out-of-pocket prescription costs at $250. Making insurers pay more toward retail drug costs ensures those costs will be passed on to employers and policy holders through premium increases, forcing the young and healthy to further subsidize the old and the sick. And Mrs. Clinton wants to stick it to drug makers by prohibiting them from deducting the cost of advertising on their taxes (as other kinds of businesses can) and shortening their patents, which will give them shorter horizons to recover their sizable investments. Making it more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to do business will either increase the costs of drugs or prevent their development in the first place.

Then, on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton said she wants to expand the "free" services mandated under Obamacare to include three doctor visits per year, on top of preventive care such as vaccines and screenings. When Democrats were selling Obamacare to taxpayers, they said fully covered preventive care would help reduce overall health care spending by giving Americans an incentive to take better care of themselves and not avoid seeking care because of cost concerns. But the law of supply and demand can't be suspended by Congress; increasing demand for health care increases costs. Now Mrs. Clinton wants sick care to be fully covered as well, which will — wait for it — increase demand for a limited supply of doctors and providers, and increase costs through higher premiums and deductibles. She also wants to deny insurers the ability to charge higher out-of-network costs for hospital care when those very networks help insurers keep costs down.

Mrs. Clinton also proposes a new tax credit for families who incur out-of-pocket medical expenses that exceed 5 percent of their income, an improvement on current tax policy that allows only the deduction of medical expenses that exceed 10 percent of adjusted gross income. But the tax credit is an expensive treatment for a symptom that would be made worse by Mrs. Clinton's other ideas, while ignoring the disease of ever-growing costs.

Insurance is supposed to cover unexpected costs. But U.S. health insurance is a bureaucratized system of pre-paid health care that covers predictable expenses. We need insurance to cover less, not more, because insurance hides the true costs of drugs, treatments and services, suppressing the pressures of competition. And contrary to what Democrats claim, Republicans have no shortage of plans to scale back, amend or replace Obamacare with tax credits, reduced mandates and the elimination of expensive tax penalties.

Mrs. Clinton wants to give us more of the same. The last thing the American health care system needs is a new dose of bad medicine.