The repeated promises that you could keep your doctor and health plan never had a basis.
These were false promises of historic magnitude, and the ramifications are that the “Dem Party is F****d” and Democrats “will own this problem forever.”
One of the benefits of Ted Cruz’s defund effort is that most Republicans can say we tried our best, but the Democrats and the Democrats alone are the reason your life has been messed up. Our hands are clean.
The loss of health plans was not just a coincidence, however, or a mere byproduct of health plan mandates requiring people to buy coverage they don’t want or need (although that was a root cause).
Rather the Obama administration passed regulations that guaranteed people would lose their health plans. As I’ve always said, watch the regs.
The mechanism was to eviscerate so-called grandfathering of older plans.
If there was even the slightest change in the plan, even an change in a co-pay, the grandfathering was lost under the regulations. Since details of plans change all the time, and people buy new plans, the regulations guaranteed that millions, and likely tens of millions, of people would not be able to keep their plans, and as a result in many cases, lose their doctors from networks.
NBC reports, Obama admin. knew millions could not keep their health insurance [original link dead, new url here, see Update No. 2]:
Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”
None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date — the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered. [See Update No. 2 below]
Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”
That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.
Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”
Democrats are downplaying the disruption to 14 million people.
But remember, we will spend 3 trillion dollars and devastate the health care system in order to bring insurance to less than twice that number of people, most of whom simply will be shoved onto Medicaid, where they will have insurance but few doctors willing to take it.
And don’t think the 14 million number is a cap. As employers drop plans in favor of the penalty, or reduce people to part time employment, tens of millions more will find themselves without the plan they thought they would have.
All of this is by design, not by chance.
Update: This is how it’s being spun — dishonestly as just about everything this administration does:
FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans.
— Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) October 29, 2013
Update No. 2: Looks like NBC republished the story at a new url, and removed one key paragraph without explanation:
Had a problem with the #Obamacare story this evening. Here's the new url: http://t.co/s8zNk2rYpD
— NBC Investigations (@NBCInvestigates) October 29, 2013
Haha. NBC News is unironically using the word “glitch” to describe what happened. http://t.co/vFpr7P45aT
— American Journalists Publish Chinese Propaganda (@JohnEkdahl) October 29, 2013
New version strikes about 80 words.
— Katherine Miller (@katherinemiller) October 29, 2013
Looks like this paragraph was cut fwiw. pic.twitter.com/9txDfxyarb
— Katherine Miller (@katherinemiller) October 29, 2013
This might be a prophetic typo:
https://twitter.com/passantino/status/395051460754284544
Update 10-29-2013 — the “missing” paragraph has been restored.
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