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.
What is this the freakin' Improv??
“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.”
I have no sypmathy for the insurance industry here; they thought they had millions of involuntary new customers they could force into plans with the support of the IRS.
Obama also took a swipe at states that didn’t set up exchanges; he is a miserable piece of %&#@ and will be remembered as such for decades.
What I want is my auto insurer to sell me health insurance.
What a munificent, kind and benevolent lord is our Lord Obama.
Isn’t anyone else sick of this guy decreeing/proclaiming the law?
Years ago here in NJ, the government put the squeeze on insurance companies because so many didn’t want to sell auto insurance here. They were told they had to sell it or they couldn’t sell other insurance; some simply packed up & left. Auto insurance is high in NJ because it is a very dense state, and insurance fraud is viewed as a legitimate means of supplementing welfare, food stamps, and section 8 housing. Even casinos started putting surveillance cameras on their outside sidewalks because of the “trip & falls”...
Obama deigns to allow bad apple insurance companies to continue to sell junk and subpar policies. Now bow your head and kiss his ring.
“What I want is my auto insurer to sell me health insurance.”
Move to Michigan and that’s exactly what you’ll get!
Notice when something bad happens he uses the pronoun “we”. When something he thinks is good happens he uses the pronoun “I”.
Now look at the “we’s” and “I’s” in the following statement. “WE did fumble the ball on it and one of the things I am going to do is make sure WE get it fixed.”
I hate fascist dictators who believe that they are some kind of god. Obama is a pig god.
By the 14th Amendment.
"The next observation is more important in view of the arguments of counsel in the present case. It is, that the distinction between citizenship of the United States and citizenship of a state is clearly recognized and established. . . .
It is quite clear, then, that there is a citizenship of the United States, and a citizenship of a state, which are distinct from each other, and which depend upon different characteristics or circumstances in the individual.
We think this distinction and its explicit recognition in this Amendment of great weight in this argument, because the next paragraph of this same section, which is the one mainly relied on by the plaintiffs in error, speaks only of privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, and does not speak of those of citizens of the several states. The argument, however, in favor of the plaintiffs, rests wholly on the assumption that the citizenship is the same and the privileges and immunities guaranteed by the clause are the same.”
—Slaughterhouse Cases: 83 U.S. 36, 73-74 (1873)
Put down the crack pipe
Wake up and smell the coffee.
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