Posted on 11/14/2013 10:02:55 AM PST by IbJensen
President Barack Obama announced a fix to the vexing problem of canceled health insurance policies Thursday, saying insurers don’t have to cancel plans next year just because of the Affordable Care Act.
Insurers can continue the plans for 2014 on two conditions — they have to tell people just what their plans don’t cover, and they have to tell people that they do have the option of going onto the health insurance exchanges to buy new plans with federal government subsidies and perhaps even to go onto Medicaid.
"Insurers can extend current plans that otherwise would have been cancelled in 2014," Obama said.
Critics of the health reform law, known widely as Obamacare, have made hay with reports that tens of thousands of people have been getting cancellation notices from their insurance companies, despite Obama’s repeated promises that people who like their insurance plans can keep them.
"This is something I deeply regret because it's scary getting a cancellation notice," Obama said at a news conference. "It’s on me. Those who got cancellation notices do deserve better and they received an apology from me. But they deserve more than words."
One main goal of Obamacare was to get rid of what the White House has called the worst abuses of the insurance industry -- caps on coverage, policies that charged women three to five times what a similar man was charged, policies that didn’t pay for cancer screening.
Some of the policies that have been canceled were very inexpensive, part of the reason for the outrage among those whose policies were canceled. But insurance and health industry experts say it’s because they were so bare-bones, they wouldn’t have paid for much if they were ever needed. The White House keeps stressing that the new rules level the playing field a little bit, but offer most people much more in terms of coverage than what they had before.
"A lot of people think, 'I've got pretty good health insurance', until they get sick," Obama said.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has also pointed out that the policies being cancelled are mostly individual policies, not the big group policies offered by employers that cover most Americans. Those policies often change every year anyway, HHS says.
According to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s group, 19 million Americans have individual plans.
Democrats who support the law have been pushing the White House to come up with some way to fix the problem. Health officials point out that it’s a very small percentage of people who are actually affected by the cancellations, but the political and public relations damage has been extensive.
Obama eventually apologized and on Wednesday he apologized again for the disastrous debut of the HealthCare.gov website.
"I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to,” he said. "Clearly we and I did not have enough awareness about the problems on the website," he added.
"We should have done a better job of getting this right on Day One...We did fumble the ball on it and one of the things I am going to do is make sure we get it fixed."
On Wednesday, the Health and Human Services Department released figures that show only 26,000 people got on the federally run website in October, the first month the exchanges were open.
Tech officials blamed poor management and political analysts said the site's failure was a new political low for the administration.
The new plan being announced by Obama gets out in front of a Republican-crafted plan that was due to come up in Congress on Friday. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi called that GOP proposal “a very dangerous bill” that is “completely disruptive” to the insurance pools, characterizing it as simply another Republican attempt to gut – not repair – the underlying health care bill.
She said that Democrats will try to present their own legislative fix for a vote on Friday to complement Obama’s “administrative” approach.
“We are in agreement. We must have a fix, and we will,” she said.
One fear is that if too many people are allowed to keep their older, cheap policies, they won’t join the pool of people buying on the exchanges – and that’ll drive up prices next year for everyone else. The more healthy people are in the pool buying policies, the more they offset the sicker people in the pool, and the less insurance companies can charge everyone. White House officials said they’ll watch and see what happens in the next year, and tweak as necessary.
Price is the main concern of most Americans when it comes to buying insurance, and the Obama administration is keen to be able to say Obamacare is keeping prices low.
The latest episode in the hopefully ending of the damned Obama regime!
How sad for America to be tormented by an evil regime that should have never happened!
Twerp-in-Chief tries to kick the can beyond the next election to prevent his National Socialist Democratic Worker’s Party from being routed in the next election.
Let’s hope it’s too little, too late, or that the good little Nazis will continue to kick this can down the road indefinitely, like they’re doing with the national debt.
So now we have an Emperor in the White House? Or is he a King?
Procrustes gets reprieve: NBC (all employed there) are in an alternate universe. I have no words that can be uttered aloud to describe Pelley.
That was the lamest set of excuses I’ve ever seen. And, what gives him the power to extend these insurance programs? It’s not in the law, and it totally screws up the relative premiums and loss ratios of the pre-existing versus the ACA compliant plans.
By what authority does the Executive modify law?
Deserve better ? Where have we heard that before ?
Watching Obama trying to act like a leader is akin to watching a fish flop around on the dock after being caught.
What is he just talking out of his azz?
I mean everyday they just do erratically steer the Ship of State this way and that.
Yeah, that should be the question
Make the bastards VOTE on the issue
Naturally, any redistribution program that gives money to low income people to buy more of the media’s advertiser’s goods is made to look good by the media.
But this article is over the top!.
This is a typical slick move by Obama and the Dems. He’s taking the monkey off of their backs and putting on the insurance companies backs. If the insurance folks do not reinstate their old policies, the people will howl at them and Obama will also publicly flog them like a rented mule.
Neither Obama nor the HHS Nazi has the legal authority to modify law. Not when it’s politically beneficial, not when it suits Herr Leader’s mood.
Is anyone in congress going to point this out?
Why do we have two parties?
Hell, why do we even have a legislature? Isn’t that only necessary in a republic?
Wait. Those terrible health care plans that were harming working Americans? Obama is extending them?
Sorry Obama but as you said 100X : ‘Obamacare is the LAW of the land’ and that law says they MUST cancel those policies. Its on you!
Andrea Mitchell grilling Wassman Schultz on MSNBC right now on it, its great,
Mitchell says “This does NOTHING!” LOLO
This implies the website won’t be ready Nov 30.
By authority of the living constitution.
Now, we are seeing the disappearance of individual liberty, a heavy-handed President who believes he can "allow" his bosses--"the People"--and the insurance companies to violate the very same law his Party passed, based on his "administrative" action.
What we need more than anything else is a rediscovery of the ideas and philosophy underlying the Constitution's limits on coercive power by elected officials.
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