Oh, by the way, ObamaCare has a provision to bail out insurers when the model collapses

Did you know ObamaCare includes a provision to bail out health insurers when the law's economic model collapses, which is of course inevitable?

Yep. And the architects of the law admit they have no idea what it will cost. CNN reports that ObamaCare signups are picking up steam to some degree, but only in the 14 states that run their own exchanges, and even there it doesn't appear that many of the desperately needed "young healthies" are signing up. That, you will recall, is a big deal because the ObamaCare economic model can't work if you can't force that group to buy overpriced policies so as to subsidize care for people with pre-existing conditions. That was always the gambit - throw everyone into the same risk pool, have them all pay the same rates, and the healthy will pay for the sick. It's basically socialized medicine with an embarrassing web site. But remember, it's not technically a mandate because Chief Justice Roberts chose to save it by redefining the "fine" as a "tax," so now buying insurance is really just an alternative to paying a tax that for most will amount to 1 percent of your annual income. As it turns out, that's almost always cheaper than buying an ObamaCare plan.

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So what happens if young healthies choose the entirely rational option of eschewing ObamaCare and fending for themselves? The economic model collapses and the insurers don't have the money to pay for all those people with pre-existing conditions. And then? You knew this was coming:

The law's supporters say the dire scenarios are farfetched. "There is essentially no risk of a 'death spiral,'" says MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who helped design the ACA as well as the Massachusetts law on which it was modeled. "There are substantial risk mitigation mechanisms as well as subsidies that will attract in healthy enrollees." Most important, say Gruber and Zirkelbach, is a section of the ACA under which the federal government will pick up a substantial portion of the losses for the next three years, if the program goes sour for insurers. There's no precedent for a program of this size and scale, and Gruber warns that that the early data are ripe for overinterpretation. While fewer young and healthy customers would mean higher premiums, "it's hard to say how big a difference 28% vs. 38% makes -- we just don't know."

So says one of the designers of ObamaCare. They "just don't know," but they wrote it into the law that if the young healthies don't sign up (which they're not) and the insurers lose a fortune (which they will), the federal government will bail them out. Talk about an open-ended financial commitment! Remember when Democrats were touting projections from the Congressional Budget Office that ObamaCare would actually reduce the deficit and would cost less than $1 trillion in its first 10 years? We always knew that was fraudulent because it counted 10 years of revenues but only six years of expenditures, since no benefits would kick in until four years after the plan was passed. Now that 10-year projections include nothing but years in which expenditures take place, and the real costs of this turkey are becoming clear, it's obvious that the 10-year cost is at least three times what they said. But that doesn't even include the cost of bailing out the insurers if the young don't sign up, which is exactly what's happening. What will that cost? And is there any end to it? They say it's only for the first three years but you know they're not going to just let the health insurance industry collapse when the three years have gone by and nothing has changed. Congress passes spending measures all the time that are supposed to have expiration dates, but they just extend them when they're supposed to expire. Is there any reason to think they won't do that here? As long as ObamaCare is the law, this is looking like a long-term entitlement cost on top of the unfunded obligations for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Those $1 trillion deficits we've seen for most of the Obama presidency might look like a drop in the bucket compared to what we'll see when this kicks in.