Health care falls apart

  Well, as we knew it would, health care is falling apart, even as we watch these last few months. Insurance companies are raising rates or merging, new restraints and conditions are being discovered in the bill, medicines and treatments are already being restricted by the let's-not-call-them-death-panels-let's-call-it-government crowd and it's becoming increasingly apparent to almost everyone that this is Obama's Waterloo. Over at Washington Examiner:

The New York Times reports there is a "growing frenzy of mergers" in the health care field in which hospitals and other care providers, pressured by the new law's provisions, are joining forces to save money. "Consumer advocates fear that the health care law could worsen some of the very problems it was meant to solve," the paper reports, "by reducing competition, driving up costs and creating incentives for doctors and hospitals to stint on care, in order to retain their cost-saving bonuses."

The Obama administration's answer to the problem will undoubtedly be more regulation. But the wave of mergers is just one of many signs of trouble with the new law.