Obamacare is reducing access to care

The Affordable Care Act has made health insurance even raise rates an average of 19 percent.

To make the situation worse, payment schedules to doctors continue to go down, making care even less accessible.

Washington has two drastically different answers to these problems. Congress wants to "stabilize" the insurance market with billions in cost-sharing subsidies. The White House wants to "hurt" insurance carriers by cutting off insurance subsidies. Both actions will further hurt Americans by reducing access to care.

The cause of instability in the health insurance market is the ACA itself, which imposed huge costs to insurance carriers via federal mandates and by expanding the administrative and regulatory apparatus. Insurance companies had to pass these costs on to consumers by raising premiums, or else accept losses of hundreds of millions of dollars, as UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Humana did.

Faced with that undesirable choice, they are engaging in rent-seeking instead. Insurers are demanding that Washington pay the costs that Obamacare forced on them, or else they will not sell insurance on its exchanges. But if Congress concedes and continues or increases insurance subsidies, where will that money go?