Suppose that, besides being the Enemies of All Mankind, health insurers are actually right.
Some companies noted last week that Congress' plans to mandate that everyone buy health insurance include only weak penalties. The plans also make insurers take on customers who are already sick. If you're young and daring, you pay the low penalty and go insurance-free until your doctor says you've got cancer. You then apply and pay $800-a-month premiums for $10,000-a-month care. Sweet, until the industry inevitably collapses, say insurers.
Suppose they're right. Insofar as Assurant, one of the nation's bigger writers of individual policies, employs 1,900 in its Milwaukee hometown, that's a lot of Milwaukeeans out of a job. The company also leads in high-deductible plans of the kind Obamacare would ban. I know we're supposed to hate insurers, but must we also want their staff unemployed?
If we're toting up the cost of Obamacare, there's surely a ledger line for the demolition of an industry, even an unpopular one. Insurers' power will be transferred to federal agencies, their earnings to a public option, their workers to the dole. Ah, well: Villains defeated.
This is exactly the spirit of Obamacare. The animating drive is to transfer: mainly money, from those who pay to those who need. The strongest appeal of Democrats' plans is that you needn't worry about coverage because someone, presumably a villain, will pay for it.
Who, exactly?