Health care: Obama's fix for canceled plans throws insurers a curveball
...One key component of Obamacare, insurers point out, is getting younger and healthier Americans to pay for health insurance. This is necessary to help subsidize the higher costs of other individuals, who will be putting more pressures on a system already exploding in costs.

In the previous system, rates for the young and healthy were generally much lower: Since they generally don’t get sick as much, they were able to pay less, in a setup similar to safe-driver discounts. Indeed, it is many of these Americans who have seen their cheaper health plans canceled and have seen their rates increase.

Now, they can go back to these old plans – assuming states will allow insurers to offer them. But this will undermine the cost structure for those already on new Obamacare plans – those with preexisting conditions, say, who now cannot be denied coverage. These new plans were designed with the assumption that more premiums would be paid by the young and healthy.

“And here we are now, with no effective subsidy for those who cost the system more,” Mr. Mangan says. “I am absolutely terrified that the increases [in claims] that will come for the insurance companies in the next year ... will be monumental.”...

The Lawlessness of the ‘Fix’
...The purpose here is not to prove, yet again, that Obama is a fraud, which would be like proving that Detroit may be a tad mismanaged. The purpose is also not to establish, yet again, Obama’s hypocrisy in condemning Bush’s flouting of a single statute when, once he assumed power, Obama so systematically violated laws that you’d think the oath says, “Take care that the laws be faithlessly executed.” The purpose is not even to reprise Thursday’s remarkable press conference, at which Obama — in the very moment of his humiliation over serial lying — brazenly repeated some of his most notorious and resoundingly disproved whoppers: the claim that his oft-repeated promise about Americans being able to keep their health-insurance plans somehow “ended up being inaccurate” when it was willfully false; the claim that this lie affects only the 5 percent of Americans in the individual market when he has known for years (as John Hinderaker shows) that Obamacare would force the cancellation of tens of millions of employer-provided plans; and so on.

No, the purpose is to highlight how insouciantly lawless and transparently political the president’s latest Obamacare “fix” is. I refer, of course, to Obama’s magnanimous proclamation that he now deigns to permit insurers to issue policies made illegal by the Obamacare statute — at least until the Democrats can get through the 2014 elections. This was frivolous to the point of malfeasance.

Let’s start with the basics. The president has no power to rewrite statutes — he is bereft of dictatorial power to legitimize what Congress has made a violation of law. This reflects our abiding conceit that we have “a government of laws and not of men,” ascribed by John Adams to the 17th-century political theorist James Harrington....

Obamacare's Creative, Or Illegal, Rule-Making
...The administration is already too reliant on creative rule-making to make the law work, such as their decision to delay the employer mandate even though it’s pretty firmly set into law. But now they’re reaching the limits of this strategy. There is always discretion in the implementation of any law, but that discretion is not infinite.

Moreover, this most recent exercise may create other problems. Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law who is involved in one of the lawsuits against Obamacare’s implementation, points out in an e-mail that “the president's action doesn't make these policies legal, it just says the feds won't enforce. State insurance commissioners may approve, but federal law still prohibits these policies.” Which makes me wonder: If those policies end up in court, will a judge go along with their creative approach? And if a judge doesn’t go along with it, what sort of chaos will envelop the insurance market?

That’s leaving aside the civic problems with having an administration that simply waives by fiat any rule that gets in the way of their grand designs. President Obama, who used to be so sharply critical of George W. Bush’s use of executive power, is now pioneering his own expansive views of what the president may do. The White House seems to believe that they are allowed to shinny around any rule, as long as they wrote it. I’d argue that this is exactly backward: They have an especial duty to uphold the laws that they themselves constructed, because if they don’t, why should the rest of us go along?