What could go wrong? Oh, right, the same thing that went wrong when Richard Nixon implemented price controls that resulted in stagflation. It’s said that those who refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it. Can someone spare us the pain and buy Obama a freaking history book?

Welcome to Nixonomics with a Hope’N'Change flare:

In a shot across the bow to the insurance industry Tuesday, President Obama warned companies facing higher costs in part because of his health care law not to hike their prices, saying “we’ll be watching closely.”

Backing up his rhetoric behind the scenes, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is quietly working on a new regulation to determine when insurance price increases are “unreasonable” and potentially prohibited by law.

The move may provide political cover heading into November’s elections as the President tries to keep the public from linking recent premium hikes to his newly-passed health care law.

But critics warn price controls could lead to either rationing or insurance companies going out of business, and point to Massachusetts’s experience with insurance price controls as a cautionary tale of what happens when pricing “turns political.”

See, clamping down on those evil insurance companies and their high prices sounds really nice, but the unintended consequences — or intended consequences with this administration — cause more pain than the high prices. Companies don’t keep operating after price controls like nothing happened. They cut back or go out of business.

(Now, that may be the intention of the Obama Administration, which seeks to eventually implement a single-payer system. But that’s not what the American people bargained for when they voted in November 2008. Americans don’t want Washington in control of their health care.)

Ed Morrissey:

In the 1970s, price controls resulted in gas lines, meat shortages, and all sorts of artificial problems when government interfered with the pricing mechanisms of competitive markets. Nixon did it for the same reasons Obama is building — evil corporations, nasty profiteering, and all of the class-warfare rhetoric anyone can stomach. The result will still be the same.

If government caps prices so that insurance companies cannot cover the cost of providing its services, insurance companies will go out of business and shortages will drive up the actual cost of health care. Remember, even though gasoline remained at a constant price, consumers had to wait hours to get their tanks filled — a cost of time that far outstripped the price increases that would have resulted without Nixon’s intervention. One cannot escape cost by manipulating price for very long, if at all, a lesson we learned almost 40 years ago, and one Obama wants to learn the hard way all over again.

There are plenty of ways to reduce costs in the health care sector, but price controls don’t work, no matter how much Obama wishes otherwise.