We all heard it from Obama a hundred times…how if you have a health insurance plan you like, you can keep it. No changes. Don’t worry about it. But, now we have this:
The question is, what can/should be done about this. I say that any of the old plans should be immediately be granted “grandfather” status. Not only is this what we were repeatedly told, but there are many for whom the forced change equates to huge rate increases that they might not be able to absorb.
Thoughts?
I think it’s a good thing that there is a minimum threshold of coverage required, as the whole point of health insurance is to avoid catastrophic costs that force someone into bankruptcy. Just like the government needs to establish a minimum amount of crash worthiness of a car and test all cars on a similar footing so that consumers can make an informed decision. I would even go so far as saying that government needs to progressively increase the quality of the health policies to seal up all uncovered pitfalls.
Originally I was in agreement with you based on your OP. After reading the article more closely, I saw that this is about the status of plans that have changed significantly enough that they are the same policy in name only.
If these policies are changing to in such a way that they are falling outside ACA minimums for plans, then it seems like the plans that are losing their grandfather status are changing for the worse. I think that is against the spirit of the reforms and undercuts the law.
So in the end I support the policy decision because this isn’t about cheap policies that provide little in effective coverage. This is about good policies made available to all and at an affordable rate. For it to work, we all have to contribute to it, and letting people like (from the OP article) this…
…keep their plans seems problematic for the law. This guy is 62 and covering himself and his wife for $228 a month? That doesn’t seem like good coverage for a guy that age. Sounds like that insurance will not be very effective at all and cause his fellow taxpayers to cover his medical costs when this guy or his wife has a serious medical issue.
What that snippet also shows is that the health exchange offers savings, will get this guy improved medical coverage, and maybe after the tax subsidy, he’ll be paying somewhere in the ballpark of what he is paying now for coverage that is actually good for somebody entering their broken hip years.
And the whole grandfathering thing should not be allowed to go on. Otherwise an insurance company could set up an insurance policy that costs $1 per year but only covers the cost of two Advil, and nothing else… This would be an obvious loophole.
We don’t know any of this and it’s all conjecture on your part.
What we do know is that the President made it a huge part of his selling plan that if you have insurance and you we happy with it you’d get to keep it. And that’s clearly (at least per this article) not the case. And not in a few cases, but for millions. If nothing else, the President’s credibility should take a huge hit. If anyone cares.
This reminds me of most American political discussions. If the politician is question in “your guy” we’ll make excuses for his actions no what mental gymnastics we have to do. If he’s “the other guy” we’ll kill him for anything he does. Seeing it now on this above.
Which you can. “If you like your current plan you can keep it” does not mean “All insurers are required to continue offering all existing plans, at the same coverage level and premium, until the end of time”.
This reminds me of most American political discussions. If the politician is question in “your guy” we’ll make excuses for his actions no what mental gymnastics we have to do. If he’s “the other guy” we’ll kill him for anything he does. Seeing it now on this above.
Sorry, but this is justification. I’m a middle of the road guy and I’m 50/50 on the President. But this isn’t how it was portrayed at all.
Did you think Obama was saying he was going to legally obligate all insurers to never drop any plans that they were currently offering as of 2010?
Well, they *do *insist that he’s a “dictator”.
When you say “you can,” you’re ignoring the 40 to 67 percent of individually insured people who can’t. This isn’t some negligible percentage of people who are being pissy because they want “the same coverage level and premium until the end of time.” As pointed out in the OP, this is millions of people who were told that they’d be able to keep their insurance and are now getting dropped because their insurance isn’t ACA compliant.
I agree with spifflog; Obama is “my guy” and yet it’s pretty apparent that this was sold in a questionable manner. This current situation seems like it should have been entirely predictable, but no mention was made about it until people started getting cancellation notices by the hundreds of thousands, and then the apologists come out of the woodwork to pretend like this was the plan all along.
This ignores the fact that these plans have to be dropped because of regulations in the law making them noncompliant with ACA. So in effect, Obama actually did order insurers to drop their plans.
Except that insurance companies aren’t just saying “We’re going to drop this plan”, the ACA is declaring that previously held policies aren’t up to snuff and so they must be modified, regardless if anyone was happy with their plan and wanted to keep it.
This is a bit misleading.
This is not about plans which are “changing to in such a way that they are falling outside ACA minimums for plans”. This is about plans which were already outside the ACA minimums for plans. The impact of the changes is not to make them fall outside the ACA minimums. The impact of the changes is that they lose grandfathered status, which means that they can no longer be offered outside the ACA minimum for plans.
I am a rampant liberal and reflexive Obama supporter, however, I fundamentally agree with magellan01 and other critics pointing to this issue.
By saying I fundamentally agree, this means I agree there is an immense disconnect with his earlier statements used to sell the plan. However, I am not prepared to use the term “lied”, which implies deliberate misleading - rather that Obama was mistaken and neither he, nor his advisers, saw this consequence.
I do believe Obama should make a point of addressing this disconnect openly, strongly and frequently. The public, supporters and critics both, need to understand that even a President can be mistaken.
Now, of course, by admitting he was wrong he runs the risk that his critics would take this as an opportunity erase all traces of his DNA from the gene pool. But IMHO there is value in getting in front of it and reminding everyone that humans are human.
It’s never a good idea to give a politician the benefit of the doubt:
So, the administration intentionally narrowed grandfathering, which directly caused people to lose their insurance.
Further:
They knew what they were doing and how many people it would affect.
Now of course when the President sold the plan, this was 2009, the regulations were written a year later. So it could be a situation where he wasn’t lying, but changed his mind, and then just didn’t bother to tell the public.
None of it should come as a shock to you, either, sincethe rule was widely reported three years ago.
Why are you trying to gin up phony outrage over a three-year-old non-scandal?
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization.
The law said the same plan is grandfathered. It seems obvious that if you change the plan enough it’s no longer the same plan. Regulations were needed to define the exact parameters. Nothing wrong with that.
I do think Obama was misleading the people when he said that everyone could keep their plan. OTOH, it was only the people who weren’t paying attention, because it was pretty clear that the ACA would impact a lot of people’s plans. On the third hand, most people don’t pay much attention, and rely on slogans and sound bites.
Old news does not mean insignificant news. A poster said that the President was probably telling the truth when he said it. That is obviously not the case, since he didn’t HAVE to have rules written that narrowed grandfathering.
It was an eminently keepable promise, which he chose not to keep.
I think you are all missing the point. These plans are grandfathered in as long as the insurance company does not change them in the ways outlined by the HHS. The origination of the change is the insurance company, so it’s like this:
grandfathered plan –> changed by insurance company –> not the same policy as the grandfathered plan –> no longer eligible to be grandfathered –> go to healthcare exchange
This is very common with grandfathered contracts anywhere. For example, my wife’s unlimited data plan on her cell phone is grandfathered. If she makes any significant change to her plan then the unlimited plan will be lost.
Remember, the change originates with the insurance company. Nobody is going to lose their insurance plan if it doesn’t change.
True, and I would be supportive of these complaints if the plans are changing so that they fall in line with ACA guidelines but are nonetheless losing that status.