WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Turns Out Obamacare Is Going to Limit Your Choices. “Prices on the insurance exchanges that will make their debut on Oct. 1 will, by broad consensus, mostly be higher than you were paying before,* but lower than some studies had projected. And why is it lower? The answer, it appears, is that state and federal regulators have been pushing insurers to hold the cost down. In some cases, insurers have simply pulled out of the market, as Aetna did when Maryland asked it to lower prices by 29 percent. In other cases, such as Kaiser Permanente in California, the companies have gone ahead offering high priced insurance that few people seem likely to buy. But it’s been clear for a while that most of the insurers who stayed on the exchanges, at least in states with aggressive pricing policies, have been keeping their costs down by restricting the number of authorized providers in the policies they offer on the exchange.”