The new health reform law, known officially as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, was signed into law last week by President Barack Obama. The final version was chock-full of all the intrusive government controls that many writers and analyst had warned about.

The Act reads like a death warrant for insurance companies. A sample:

• Sec. 2711 forces health insurance companies to remove without lifetime limits from all of the plans they offer. Insurers are also prohibited from having an annual limit on benefits that are deemed by the government to be "unreasonable."
• Sec. 2713 forces insurers to include preventive services and immunizations, with no cost-sharing.
• Sec. 2718 forces insurers to report the percentage of premium revenue that they spend on care, and (up until the year 2013) refund their customers if the percentage is not to the government's liking.
• Sec. 2702 forces insurers to accept every employer and individual that applies for coverage, regardless of just about any factor that might matter, such as health status or utilization of services. The government calls this guaranteed availability and renewal.
• Sec. 1104 forces insurers to comply with uniform standards and operating rules for the way they communicate and do business with providers. These standards, of course, will be developed by the government. This is HIPAA redux.
• Sec. 2704 forces insurers to ignore all relevant facts about an individual's current health, health risks, or health history when offering coverage.
• Sec. 1343 forces insurers to pay penalties if their enrollees are deemed to have lower-than-average risk. (This is a clever way of automatically putting fifty percent of health plans on the ropes each year.)

With the stroke of a pen, the President has begun the systematic dismantling of an entire industry. He should know that insurance is a type of contractual agreement that enables individuals to share risk in exchange for compensation. He should know that insurance is a brilliant financial invention and a win-win arrangement when both sides are free to act voluntarily in the context of a free market.

But thanks to a moral code that tells him that profit is evil and that people ought to sacrifice for one another, he does not know these things. And neither does 98 percent of Congress.

In the immediate aftermath of this Act, things will seem normal. Nobody will die today or next week as a result of these government actions. Consequences take time. But when the effects do materialize, people may realize who is responsible and why these actions are so inexcusable. "Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live."¹

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¹ Ayn Rand. "Galt's Speech" For the New Intellectual p133

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