Guess who OPPOSES hospitals offering to help pay for insurance premiums?

Wow. The logic here is just...wow:

Low-income consumers struggling to pay their Obamacare premiums may soon be able to get help from their local hospital or United Way.

Some hospitals in New York, Florida and Wisconsin are exploring ways to provide such aid, which would at least partly guarantee the hospitals get paid when the consumers seek care.

But the hospitals' efforts have set up a conflict with insurers, which worry such programs will add too many sick people to their rolls. The premium assistance could drive up costs for everyone and discourage healthier people from buying coverage, insurers wrote recently to the Obama administration.

Think about that one for a moment.

The hospitals (you know, the ones who are supposed to help heal the sick) are offering to help pay the insurance companies for patients who can't afford it otherwise...and the insurance companies are actually opposed to this...because it might add "too many sick people" to their customer base.

Yes, I understand the actuarial rationale behind this. Of course insurance companies would rather have nothing but 100% healthy people who don't go white-water rafting or snowboarding. From an insurer POV, the ideal customer would pay them gobs of money every month for years at a time without ever actually, you know, using the services that the company is supposed to be providng.

This is the same sort of logic that has private, for-profit charter schools cherry-picking the best students and kicking the poorer performing ones to the curb...so that they can claim to have high achievements and continue to rake in taxpayer money. And we all know what a rousing success THAT thinking has been.