Contra USA Today, the shrinking of Obamacare networks is not a surprise.

The USA Today article itself is fine enough…

Nancy Pippenger and Marcia Perez live thousands of miles apart but have the same complaint: Doctors who treated them last year won’t take their insurance now, even though they haven’t changed insurers.

[snip]

Both women unwittingly enrolled in policies with limited networks of doctors and hospitals that provide little or no payment for care outside those networks. Such plans existed before the health law, but with its expansion of insurance, they are covering more people — and some are shrinking enrollees’ options further than before. The policies’ limitations have come as a surprise to some enrollees used to broader job-based coverage or to plans they held before the law took effect.

…but the title (“Surprise! New health plans’ limitations anger enrollees”) bugs me.  Specifically, the surprise part.  You see…

• August, 2013. I told you so.
• October, 2013. I told you so.
• October, 2013. I told you so.
• January, 2014. I told you so.
• March, 2014. I told you so.
• April, 2014.  I told you so.

Basically, it should surprise nobody that the current set of federal mandates, rulings, taxes, and prohibitions have shrunk doctor networks.  The Obama administration at this point obsesses over increasing Obamacare signups the way that Captain Ahab obsessed over Moby Dick*, to the detriment of Medicare Advantage and individual market policy holders: and the first wave of the same thing happening to group policy holders is yet to come.  Which is to say, the majority of Americans with insurance.  I am sorry that more people didn’t hear me bang this particular drum, but alas! – Major news media networks, when they headhunt at all from social media personalities, tend to go with over-educated, Ivy League, vaguely-liberal smirkers who have never held a real job in their (typically white, upper-class, and male) lives.

Which would bug me less if the aforementioned smirkers weren’t wrong all the time. Or if they learned from their mistakes. Although I suppose that the latter would ensure the former.

(Via @Allahpundit)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*If you haven’t yet, read the book sometime to see how that worked out for him.