Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute is one of the shrewdest health care analysts around. He is predicting now what many have feared, the slow motion consolidation of the insurance industry as the big boys become government sanctioned monopolies and small providers disappear. Insurance policies for individuals and small organizations will become untenable.
The new order will start as soon as next January when new rates are announced--two months after the 2010 elections.
Your choices will be narrowed and narrowed again.
Says Gottlieb, the "rich" that the President has targeted will turn out to be any couples with incomes of $100,000 or more. To afford the level of care they enjoy now such families will be looking at expenditures reaching 20 to 25 percent of their income. In the end, nearly everyone will be in the public system, lucky if they can buy special private policies for extra benefits, as under Medicare now.
It will be very complicated, a bureaucrats' delight, a citizen's nightmare. This is crony socialism: the form of a "free market" will be preserved (along with the opportunity to extract massive campaign contributions from it), but it will be a government industry in all but name.
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