Of course they are; this bill feeds them a guaranteed customer base. This is the largest issue I have with ObamaCare. The sole job of an insurance company is to assess risk. With a government mandated customer base there is no longer any risk to asses.

So... Why are the insurance companies involved at all? Why are they still in business? That's rhetorical, I know the answer, and I don't like it. We're all paying a middle man to do nothing for us.

> Of course they are; this bill feeds them a guaranteed customer base. This is the largest issue I have with ObamaCare. The sole job of an insurance company is to assess risk. With a government mandated customer base there is no longer any risk to asses.

I'm no fan of insurance companies, but this statement does not compute. Of course there's still risk involved - the risk that the patient's costs will exceed premiums. If you set the premium too high, the customer will flee to a competitor. You also can't raise your premiums too high, because you have the 80% medical loss ratio - you can no longer just eat the rest as profit [1].

Totally agree that government should be the single payer or even the sole provider of healthcare (though that model isn't as widely implemented (UK NHS, US Veterans Admin) and has it's challenges as well).

[1] http://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Forms-Reports-and-Other-R...

Because Obama was unable to garner enough support for Single Payer... at least, not yet. While the ACA is hardly a perfect law, its quite possible that the greatest thing it accomplishes is showing Americans how much worse our current system is than the Single Payer systems the rest of the 1st world employs.

While the insurance companies were generally lobbying for the ACA (although there's definitely clauses they did not support), they are vehemently against Single Payer, since it puts them all out of business.