When Big Government Begets Big Business
The left claims that they dislike “big business.” It comes through in their rhetoric. They’re always railing against big, giant corporations while posturing themselves as the champions of small business.
What’s ironic about this is that the big government policies the left supports very often necessitate big business. After all, who else but big corporations can afford to purchase the equipment and hire the lawyers and lobbyists and compliance teams to keep up with exacting government standards and regulations?
When doing business becomes harder and more complicated the only response businesses have is to pool resources and get larger.
Case in point, Obamacare, a policy that is winnowing the already small number of large corporate players in the health insurance markets.
The urge to merge is sweeping managed health care. Aetna announced Friday a $37 billion deal to acquire Humana. Anthem and Cigna are in merger talks and could be next. The national for-profit insurers are on an anxious mission to consolidate. These combinations will sharply reduce competition and consumer choice, as five big insurers shrink, probably, to three.
This trend is a direct consequence of ObamaCare, reflecting the naïveté of its architects and the fulfillment of their myopic vision.
The whole piece at the Wall Street Journal, written by Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute, is worth your time to read. But the basic point is this: Obamacare made the health insurance marketplace vastly more regulated and complex. As a result, the few giant companies that served it nationally have become fewer and bigger.
It is a direct cause-and-effect relationship, and it’s an ironic one given that those who caused it are also those who claim to be against big business.
We are all served better by diverse marketplaces with robust competition and a healthy spirit of entrepreneurship. Obamacare, as public policy, undermined all of those things and the result will be higher prices for health insurance and more bureaucracy.
Or exactly what Americans didn’t want.
