Bill Carmichael: Unhealthy grip of government

The Affordable Care Act, more informally known as Obamacare, was supposed to sign up seven million uninsured Americans to health care plans by March of next year. But the scheme, launched amid much fanfare at the beginning of this month, hit problems from the start.

The website, which took three years 
and more than £300m to build, and where Americans were supposed to compare and buy insurance plans, has proved to be an embarrassing failure.

Users have experienced freezes, crashes, long wait times and poor security over personal information. Instead of the expected flood of applications, the number of people signing up is estimated to be little more than a trickle – the figures are so bad the White House won’t release the details.

President Obama has promised a “tech surge” to fix things and says the website will be working by the end of November – two months after the official launch.

But the problems with Obamacare go deeper than a busted website. Millions of people are furious that their existing health care plans are being cancelled and they are being offered new policies – often at a much higher price.

This despite Obama’s repeated promises to the American people that “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it”.

Obama’s supporters hit back saying that the new healthcare plans are superior to the old ones with more comprehensive coverage. But people are asking why they should be forced to pay for coverage they don’t need. For example why would a 55-year-old woman pay extra for maternity and paediatric care, or a life-long teetotaller pay for alcohol abuse coverage?

The problem here is the Government thinks it knows the insurance business better than the insurance companies do.

For centuries insurance firms have calculated premiums on the basis of risk. The higher the risk of you claiming on your insurance, the more you pay. That’s why an 85-year-old with terminal cancer would pay more for life insurance than a healthy 25-year-old.

But the US government has decided this is “discriminatory” and is instead trying to rig the market.

Obamacare depends on the assumption that millions of healthy young people will be prepared to pay over the odds for their insurance in order to subsidise older, sicker people. If they don’t the whole vastly expensive and bureaucratic edifice will collapse.

I suspect Obamacare is little to do with healthcare or even insurance. What it really constitutes is a sneaky, backdoor route to income redistribution.

Perhaps the real lesson behind the Obamacare debacle is that big government is so expensive and inefficient that try as it might it can’t get anything right.

Right call on phone

TV chef Jamie Oliver has banned his eldest daughter, Poppy, from having a mobile phone to prevent her from being bullied. The 11-year-old is the only girl her class not to have one.

Tough call. We all know the tremendous pressure children can feel to fit in with the herd and I’m sure Poppy feels she is being left out.

If it is any comfort, we took the same decision with our children and haven’t regretted if for a second. The youngest – now 14 – has never owned a mobile phone and wasn’t allowed a Facebook account until she was 13.

It hasn’t harmed her a jot. She is perfectly comfortable using computers when she needs to, but most of the time seems to prefer that old-fashioned technology known as a book.