Obamacare: The Price Controls Begin
Conn Carroll /
The Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday that, starting next year, health insurance companies must receive permission from the Obama administration before they can raise rates higher than 10%. As we warned before Obamacare even became law, this is a form of price control, a government intervention that has a long and well established history of failure.
Way back in 1993, Heritage Foundation scholar Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier was detailing the shortcomings of price controls in health care:
Price controls would not work in health care because they attack the symptoms of runaway costs, not the cause. Medical costs today are soaring because consumers are largely insulated from them…and because the tax system discourages consumers from seeking good value for money in health care. (more…)