Obamacare’s Four Tiers Are Scrap Metal Grade

America is in a mighty tailspin, thanks to our incompetent president and a bought and paid for Congress. Here the WSJ explains how Americans must now pay first-class fares for coach-seat-quality health care. Why? Because we have a highly Marxist-influenced president whose goal is first and foremost about social equity and income redistribution. Do you know whose health plans are being taken away? America’s self-employed and small business owners are getting the O’Shaft. As I have written often, these are just the risk-taking Americans who create most of the new jobs in America. Do you know that O’Care is limited to just four plans? The Journal explains here that nearly half the plans are tightly managed HMOs and that patients face the prospect of waiting months and driving miles to clinics and county hospitals. Do you know that with O’Care, even if you do not have children, you must have pediatric vision benefits? O’Care is the worst act of government mayhem since FDR’s National Recovery Act.

Regulators mandated a very rich level of “essential” health benefits that all plans in the individual market must cover, regardless of cost. This year eHealth reported that its data show individual premiums must be 47% higher than the old average to fund the new categories in the individual market.

Meanwhile, ObamaCare’s plans are limited to essentially four. Yes, four. The law converts insurance products on the ObamaCare exchanges into interchangeable commodities that finance the same standard benefit at the same average expense over four tiers known as bronze, silver, gold and platinum.

So, for example, a bronze plan covers 60% of health-care expenses and the beneficiary pays a lower premium to pick up the remaining 40% out of pocket. Platinum carries a higher premium for a 90%-10% split. But there can be little deviation from the formulas—that is, there is little room for innovation or policy choice—to suit customer preferences.

In any case all four tiers are scrap-metal grade, because the rules ObamaCare imposes to create a supposedly superior insurance product are resulting in an objectively inferiormedical product. The new mandates and rules raise costs, so insurers must compensate by offering narrow and less costly networks of doctors, hospitals and other providers in their ObamaCare products. Insurers thus restrict care and patient choice of physicians in exchange for discounted reimbursement rates, much as Medicaid does.