Call it whatever you like. Just don’t call today’s health insurance scenario an example of free enterprise.

The state Department of Insurance announced this week that health insurance premium rates will rise sharply next year for residents who buy individual plans.

Insurance companies are requesting 2017 premium increases averaging 32.5 percent for individual health plans, 7.1 percent for small group employee plans.

Insurance Commissioner Teresa Miller said the increases are needed to keep insurers from abandoning the market.

“We were trying to make a one-time correction ... we hopefully got these products to a place now where they are more accurately priced,” Miller said.

Whatever that means.

Gone are the days when a seller of health insurance offered coverage at a price that attracted consumers to pay for it. Gone are the concepts of competition, bargain, supply and demand, or value.

And now there’s an additional hidden cost revealed.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Penn Treaty American Corp., once the nation’s second-largest long-term care insurer, is about to fail. State regulators seized Penn Treaty in 2009 and continue to operate it “in rehabilitation,” according to the Inquirer, but with an actuarial estimate of $4 billion and nearly $500 million in uncovered obligations, the company is under court order to liquidate next month. When that happens, it will be the biggest and most expensive failure in the history of the health insurance industry.

Once Penn Treaty is liquidated, its remaining obligations will be covered by the Pennsylvania Life & Health Guaranty Association, an umbrella organization of insurers that will pass on the expense to all its policy holders as a premium surcharge. Guaranty associations in other states will pay for Penn Treaty policy holders living in their states.

In other words, the consumer ultimately is on the hook for Penn Treaty’s failure.

So the question might be this: Is the failure of Penn Treaty directly linked to the rising costs associated with the Affordable Care Act?

The argument could be made that deeper, more complex influences and demographic conditions are responsible. The sheer spread of chain senior-care homes, in rapid pursuit of an aging baby boomer population, has exerted a great strain on health care, exposing long-term care financing as the weakest link in our chain of health-care needs planning. Absent any other element, the aging of Pennsylvania’s population makes Penn Treaty, with its focus on retirement planning, the most vulnerable to collapse.

Suffice it to say that an aging state and national population is beset by financial pressures regardless of the health insurance program in place. The question is whether the program is being operated efficiently and effectively.

And the answer to that question remains elusive.