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Obamacare isn't facing a 'death spiral'

By The Washington Post  
   November 08, 2013

No one is quite sure how bad HealthCare.gov's problems are. The result is no one is quite sure what Obamacare's "worst-case scenario" is. But in some corners of the media, a grisly consensus is emerging: It's a "death spiral." "Is Obamacare in a death spiral?" asks Megan McArdle. "The death spiral is already beginning," warns David Frum. No, it isn't. To health wonks, a "death spiral" means something very specific. Just ask professional health wonk Larry Levitt, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. "A death spiral is a pool where you have disproportionately sick people enrolling, which causes premiums to go up, and then healthy people drop out because it?s a bad deal, and then premiums rise more, and so on," he says.

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