Heath and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is striking back at health insurers who aren't getting on board with ObamaCare.
Last week she got upset with all the news of health insurers raising their premiums and promptly issued a retort: "Simply stated, we [the Obama administration] will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections."
So, ObamaCare requires health insurers to (1) drop any maximum pay-out limit, (2) provide free preventive care, (3) cover "children" up to age 26 (well into child-bearing age), and (4) drop pre-existing condition exclusions, to name a few, and health insurers aren't supposed to charge more for this grab bag of new benefits?
And just so health insurers understand the cost of trying to recover the claims imposed by ObamaCare, she warned that those insurers going rogue might not be included in the health insurance exchanges slated for 2014.
Welcome to the new America, where unelected officials who have no constitutional authority to do so, dictate rules, threaten companies and impose price controls.
Why is the secretary so energized over this issue? The rising premiums make a mockery of the president's oft-repeated promise that health insurance premiums would be $2,500 lower by the end of his first term. The way things are going, we'll be lucky if they're only $2,500 higher.
But there is another important budgetary reason. ObamaCare provides a sliding-scale subsidy for families making up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, which is about $88,000 for a family of four today.
The higher the premiums, the more the government must spend on the subsidies -- and the less money it has for bailouts and stimulus packages.
There's nothing surprising about this, of course. Health insurance premiums have been exploding in Massachusetts, which passed its own version of ObamaCare in 2006. And now the state is fighting most of the premium increases.
Secretary Sebelius is just starting the price-control implementation process a little sooner, trying to save both ObamaCare and her boss.