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.”
