two reasons why ObamaCare drives up the cost of insurance

From the editorialists of the WSJ...

The White House is priming the defibrillator paddles to revive ObamaCare, and its new strategy is to talk about "health-insurance reform," rather than "health-care reform." The point is to make its proposals seem less radical than they are, while portraying private insurers as villains for supposedly denying coverage to the sick....

President Obama's horror stories are about the individual insurance market, where some 15 million people buy coverage outside of the workplace. Mr. Obama does have a point about insurance security....But what the President and Democrats won't tell you is that these problems are the result mainly of government intervention

Because the tax code subsidizes private insurance only when it is sponsored by an employer, the individual market is relatively small and its turnover rate is very high....difficult for insurers to maintain large risk pools to spread costs...

Mr. Obama wants to wave away this reality with new regulations that prohibit "discrimination against the sick"—specifically, by forcing insurers to cover anyone at any time and at nearly uniform rates. But if insurers are forced to sell coverage to everyone at any time, many people will buy insurance only when they need medical care. This raises the cost of insurance for everyone else...only five states—Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Vermont—have Mr. Obama's proposal for "guaranteed issue" on the books today. New Hampshire and Kentucky repealed such laws after finding...

Another proposed reform known as "community rating" imposes uniform premiums regardless of health condition. This also blows up the individual insurance market, by making it far more expensive for young, healthy or low-risk consumers to join pools...35 states today impose no limits whatsoever on how much insurers can vary premiums and six states allow wide variation among consumers....

ObamaCare would impose on all 50 states rules that have already proven to be failures in numerous states. Because these mandates would raise the cost of insurance, ObamaCare would then turn around and subsidize individuals to buy the insurance that the politicians made more expensive. Only in government could such irrationality be sold as "reform."