Heidi Alexander: “We talk a lot about the law of unintended consequences in dealing with legislation. In this case I believe the health…”

“We talk a lot about the law of unintended consequences in dealing with legislation. In this case I believe the health care law is a situation where we had a lot of predictable consequences. Republicans were saying, for example, premiums are going to rise. In fact, they have. We were saying specifically that individual premiums will rise. It was predictable they would because, in the first place, the health care law requires that individuals buy a better policy than what they buy today. So if they are going to buy a Cadillac instead of a Chevy, it will cost more and they will get more benefits. Second, there are some taxes in the health care law, such as with medical devices, that are passed on to the consumer and premiums will go up. Third, a lot of people who moved into Medicaid are going into a system of government health care where the doctors aren't properly reimbursed. Many of the doctors shift the costs over to the people who buy insurance. That is called cost shifting. For all those reasons, we have seen stories regularly in California, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Connecticut that individual premiums, over the last year, have gone up at least partially due to mandates included in the new law. Let's look at some of the other issues we talked about during that time. We said the bill would raise taxes. In fact, it does--$813 billion. As I mentioned, the tax on medical devices is passed right along to people who buy insurance, and their costs go up.…”