The article in the Baltimore Sun proclaims “Healthcare Reform Law to Usher in New Age of Consumerism.” Given that the Affordable Care Act (aka, ObamaCare or ACA) places many new restrictions on the type of health insurance that can be sold to consumers, I find this headline difficult to believe. In all likelihood, the end result of ObamaCare will be far less choice for consumers, not a new golden age of consumerism.

The article points out all the ways health insurance companies may innovate in the future to attract new customers. While insurance companies may offer health coaching or a diet app, these are essentially gimmicks. These companies will be forced to compete on these basically meaningless items because ACA bans them from competing on the stuff that really matters to consumers.

It does this through the mandate that the health insurance plans sold to individuals and small businesses must offer an “essential benefits package.” This may sound pro-consumer, but in reality it limits consumer choice. This benefits package is what the politicians and regulators think you need in your health insurance, not what you think you need. If you are a forty-year-old single man, your health insurance must still contain pediatric coverage. If you are a couple in your fifties whose children are already out of the house, you still pay for maternity coverage.

In short, these mandated benefits mean that you can’t buy an insurance policy tailored to your need. You have to buy a policy that doesn’t meet your health care needs; instead, you must buy one that satisfies the desires of the politicians and regulators. And since this extra coverage costs money to provide, you pay extra for the privilege of being forced to buy more insurance than you want.

Likewise, ACA also limits the amount of consumer cost-sharing an insurance policy may contain. That, too, sounds like something that’s pro-consumer, but it’s only pro-consumer if the consumer doesn’t want to make a tradeoff of a high deductible for a lower premium price.

It’s not pro-consumer to mandate that people buy health insurance coverage they don’t want or may never need. It’s not pro-consumer to outlaw an insurance company offering an insurance policy that’s targeted to meet your individual health care needs.

The bill hurts consumers in other ways. In an excellent article, the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon lists a number of examples of how ObamaCare’s provisions have side-effects that end up harming those the bill intends to help:

At the same time Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius was threatening to bankrupt insurers who claim ObamaCare is increasing premiums by more than 1 percent, her own employees estimated that one of the law's regulations — the requirement to purchase unlimited annual coverage — will increase some people's premiums by 7 percent or more when fully implemented. A Connecticut insurer estimated that just the provisions taking effect last year would increase some premiums by 20-30 percent.

Such mandates force consumers to divert income from food, housing, and education to pay for the additional coverage. That can leave consumers worse off, even threaten their health. They can also force employers to reduce hiring, leaving some Americans with neither a job nor health insurance. This reality led McDonald's to seek a waiver from the unlimited annual coverage mandate, among other rules.

The ban on discriminating against children with pre-existing conditions has caused insurers to stop selling child-only policies in dozens of states. The dependent-coverage mandate was cited as one of the reasons spurring a Service Employees International Union local in New York City to eliminate coverage for 6,000 dependent children.

Cannon’s point is that all the government interventions in ObamaCare, including the ones labeled as “consumer protections,” distort the health insurance market. All have unintended consequences as companies and consumers adapt to them. Simply looking at the supposed benefits of these rules ignores the real harm they impose. As he notes, “calling these rules ‘consumer protections’ implies that the people harmed don't matter, or one has clairvoyance to know that the benefits outweigh the costs.

The ACA is anti-consumer at its heart, and no amount of gimmickry from insurance companies (or the federal government) can mask that fact.