By THE WASHINGTON TIMES - - Sunday, January 25, 2015

President Obama is for choice and competition in the health-insurance market, as befits a champion of the free market, except when he isn’t. “My guiding principle is, and always has been,” he said in 2009 when he was trying to sell Obamacare, “that consumers do better when there is choice and competition. That’s how the market works. In Alabama, almost 90 percent of the market is controlled by just one company. And without competition, the price of insurance goes up and quality goes down.”

Who could argue with that? Given the rapid increases in health care costs over the past decades, that was music in the ears of the American voters. Everyone knows that when just one or two companies corner a market, they’ll skimp on quality and raise prices. Greed is the enemy of the free market.

Two years after Obamacare opened for business, Mr. Obama’s health care scheme isn’t exactly solving the problem every American must deal with. A study by the Heritage Foundation finds that there’s less competition and more dissatisfaction than ever. The number of insurers has declined by 21.5 percent, and by the government’s own measurement the Obamacare exchanges are less competitive, by a factor of 75 percent, than before the Affordable Care Act was enacted by Democrats with no help, or votes, from Republicans.

In Mr. Obama’s example of Alabama, for example, the number of insurance carriers has plummeted by 87 percent since the president’s “era of greater competition” dawned. West Virginia, for another example, the number of insurance providers has declined from 24 to one. Like his infamous promise that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” the promise of more competition goes into the whopper hopper. There is no real competition in the insurance marketplace, only a largely unresponsive monopoly.



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