All across the country, cost-conscious Americans have found a way of their own around Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act, because it's "just not affordable." That's how Robin Herman sums up the problem. She's the owner of a marketing firm in San Francisco, and if action speaks louder than words, and it always does, her opinion is widely shared. All these Americans are buying the kind of basic no-frills health insurance that should should have been available to them all along in a free market.
"This is saving me a ton of money for the year," says Ms. Herman. It also can save We the (tax-paying) People the cost of maintaining the army of bureaucrats required to administer government-decreed health insurance, including all the periodic waivers and exceptions they must issue from time to time, or at least respond to questions about them. Or dodge them.
Naturally enough, all the special interests aligned with Obamacare are squawking. "This is exactly the kind of coverage the ACA was designed to get rid of," says Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation. To use a good old American expression, so what? More than half of those customers opting for basic, short-term, no bells-and-whistles coverage say they're doing it to save money, and there'll be no stopping them.
But if their decision doesn't work out? Suppose they haven't taken some pre-existing health condition into account? Or otherwise overlooked something or other? Then they can always switch to Obamacare or another alternative.
The moral of this story: Don't ever sell the American consumer short. He--or she--can recognize a bargain, and feels free to look for one. This is how another American institution works. It's called shopping.
Editorial on 04/16/2016