Maybe we need Durbincare instead

Aetna is joining UnitedHealthcare and Humana in rushing to exit the Affordable Care Act because Aetna can’t afford $430 million in losses. Now maybe there is a little pushback here because the feds are suing to stop Aetna’s $37 billion purchase of Humana, or maybe the lawsuit is coercion to keep Aetna in the Obamacare fold — but the loss numbers are real and tripled in a year.

Which brings to mind U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin’s recent browbeating of Blue Cross Blue Shield, claiming the health insurer’s poor management was to blame for proposed health insurance rate increases for the coming year that range from 23 to 42 percent. He also took a swipe at Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration — not that Super Lib Durbin might run for governor or anything — to pressure the Blues to drop their rates.

“I trust that the Illinois Department (of Insurance) will hold BCBS to an honest standard which requires reform of their practices reflecting the new health care marketplace, professional management of their company and a sensitivity to the costs to be borne by businesses and consumers in our state,” said Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate.

So let’s try to better understand the sensitive Durbin view: The insurance company is to blame for not wanting to lose more money. Rauner, who showed up 18 months ago, is to blame for weak Illinois laws that give his appointed insurance regulators no real power over the companies.

Who designed Obamacare and was one of its biggest supporters? If the design is flawed from the get-go because it expects less money to create more benefit for the sickest among us, then is the best fix to blame those trying to implement it? If you tell them to use balsa wood rafters, do you blame the roofers when the shingles come tumbling through the ceiling?

Durbin and the other architects of the Unaffordable Care Act should take a closer look at those 20,202 pages of regulations spawned by their efforts to go from 15 percent of the population without insurance to about 10 percent. Maybe the insurance companies missed some brilliant advice about how to stay in business despite $430 million in losses. Maybe the Illinois Obamacare coop, Land of Lincoln Health, failed to grasp a concept in that 6-feet-9 stack of regulations that caused them to go belly up and leave 49,000 people seeking health insurance in a shrinking marketplace.

Maybe what Durbin has here is failure to communicate. A sharply worded press release should fix it all, maybe on his “Durbin for Governor in 2018” letterhead.

This story was originally published August 19, 2016 at 7:00 PM with the headline "Maybe we need Durbincare instead."