Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post brings an important trend to our attention:

Seventy-three percent of insurers say they plan to increase individual market business, according to a Boston Consulting Group survey last spring. Nearly every health plan mentioned strategic plans to expand its number of individual policies when presenting to investors at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this year. All told, the consulting group expects insurers’ profits to “more than double from 2011 to 2019, to about $1.2 trillion.”
That additional profit will grow out of the health reform law’s creation of a new market. Right now, about 14 million Americans purchase individual insurance policies. But many who want to can’t: As Kaiser Health News reported last week, about 20 percent of individual insurance applicants are turned away for preexisting conditions. Many more probably don’t purchase coverage because it’s expensive: More than half of individual market subscribers spend more than $6,000 per year on premiums, according to a 2009 Commonwealth Fund report.
The health reform law makes two changes that are expected to drive millions of Americans into the individual market in 2014. First, it makes buying insurance by yourself affordable, with public subsidies for anyone making less than 400 percent of the federal poverty line. Second, it requires nearly all Americans to buy insurance. Those two policies, taken together, will push a lot of people into buying insurance coverage. And if they don’t have an employer-sponsored health plan, they’ll probably purchase one on the individual market.

One assumes that private insurers will become a powerful lobby on behalf of retaining and expanding the new health law come 2014. Those who favor repealing the law, or even scaling back subsidies to private insures, will find themselves in a difficult if not impossible position.