Faced with a more costly insurance pool, many insurers have simply decided to quit a losing game.

Others have responded with the rate hikes. The danger is that the latest premium hike will mean that more young and healthy people will choose to go without insurance. The insurance pool will then become even older and sicker. Insurance companies will respond by hiking rates yet again. And so on. The spiral into dysfunction continues.

It’s true, of course, that a relatively small portion of Americans get their insurance through the exchanges, roughly 3.5 percent. Most Americans still receive their insurance through work, where premium hikes have been lower. But there’s no reason to believe that ObamaCare’s problems won’t eventually spill over into the employer market.

The good news is that ObamaCare’s problems have now gotten so bad that even Democrats are admitting something needs to be done. The bad news is that there remains an almost unbridgeable divide over what that something should be.