Keep Your Health Insurance: Not So Says IBD

President Obama famously often said

if you like your health insurance, you'll keep it

Not so says an Investor's Business Daily study.

internal White House documents reveal that 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage by 2013 due to ObamaCare. That numbers soars to 66% for small-business employers.

The documents — product of a joint project of the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department and the IRS — examine the effects new regulations would have on existing, or “grandfathered,” employer-based health care plans.

Draft copies of the documents were reportedly leaked to House Republicans earlier in the week. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., posted them on his Web site Friday afternoon. (View the full report here.)

In fact, I made a similar assertion when I analyzed the House version of the bill last summer.

The nexis, if you will, of government control starts on page 72 and page 84. Those two pages establish the government health exchange, define the government's role in it, and define what providers must enroll in it. The health care exchange will be administered by a new bureaucracy, the Health Choices Administration. Any insurer, health practitioner, or hospital in the health care exchange will be subject to the regulations of the exchange as laid out by the Health Choices Administration.

Who needs to be in the exchange? Any health care provider that provides health care that is paid in whole or in part by a third party must be in the exchange. In other words, any hospital that accepts insurance must be part of the exchange. All insurance companies must be part of the exchange. Chiropractors, laser surgeries, and other procedures that don't accept insurance would not be part of this exchange. As such, almost the entire health care industry would fall under the control of the health care exchange. The health care exchange would now be regulated by the Health Choices Administration.

As such, it is totally misleading to say that if you like your health care it won't change. That's only if your current health care plan conforms to whatever regulations are created by the Health Choices Administration.

That's the critical point. There will be well over 100 new regulators and bureaucracies created by the bill. There will also be a new government run exchange. In both cases, the government will decide what is and isn't appropriate as far as health insurance. With all of these new government controls, it's impossible to know what will and won't be appropriate and so this new study is not altogether surprising.