“It’s A Disaster Hiding In Plain Sight” Peter Schiff Slams Big Policies & Bigger Failures

by Peter Schiff via Euro Pacific Capital,
ZeroHedge.com
Aug 19, 2016

Economics is far simpler than most in academics or government would have you believe. To make accurate predictions all you really need is an honest appreciation of the self-interest that is at the heart of free market transactions and an ability to understand how regulations that attempt to “correct” these realities don’t work. This is certainly the case with the completely predictable slow-motion train wrecks that are the signature U.S. domestic policy experiments of the last eight years: Obamacare and Federal Reserve stimulus. From the start, I issued countless commentaries on why both would fail spectacularly. The jury has started to come back on Obamacare, and the results are a disaster. And while the verdict on the Fed’s policies has yet to arrive in similarly stark terms, I believe that its failure is just as certain.

As I explained in my July 30, 2012 commentary “Justice Roberts is Right: The Plan Won’t Work,” the central flaw (among many others) in Obamacare is that it incentivizes younger, healthier people to drop out of insurance coverage while encouraging older, sicker people to sign up. The result would be a pool of insurance participants that would guarantee losses for those providing coverage. That’s exactly what we are seeing.

>After only four years of operation, there is now wholesale defection by insurance companies to abandon the Obamacare marketplace because they are hemorrhaging money faster than just about anyone predicted. To believe that any other outcome was possible would have been the equivalent of believing in the Tooth Fairy.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the four biggest U.S. health insurance companies, Anthem, Aetna, UnitedHealth and Humana are losing hundreds of millions of dollars on their Obamacare plans. And since these companies can’t be compelled to operate a business that loses money, all four have significantly scaled back their offerings. UnitedHealth has already exited 31 of the 34 states where it sells ACA policies. Humana is now offering coverage in just 156 counties of the 1,351 counties in which it was active a year ago. The latest shoe to drop came this week when Aetna said it would stop selling Obamacare plans in 11 of the 15 states where it is currently active (Bloomberg Businesweek, 8/17/16).

The Rest…HERE

This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2016 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Conspiracy, Corruption, Economics, Government Evil, New World Order. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.