If the ACA-compliant plans fit the purchaser’s needs as well as the non-compliant ones, then they wouldn’t be upset about it now. Even had they known that these plans were non-compliant, I don’t know why they would not have purchased them anyway for the time being. Nobody lost anything by failing to purchase an ACA-compliant plan one year earlier than the law required.
To the extent that the insurers failed to adequately inform the people that the plans were non-compliant it’s more likely due to a fear of losing out to other plans who were not adequately informing the people, not due to a fear that people wuoldn’t want this type of plan.
I don’t disagree with any of that. My claim is quite limited: some of the anger and shock arises from people not knowing that the post-March 2010 plans they purchased were non-compliant and would be canceled. To them, these cancellations are coming as a surprise. They feel like they are having the rug pulled out from under them as a consequence, when in fact they could and should have known this going in. If insurers had collectively made this clear, that aspect of the problem would be eliminated.
The point is that the one pulling the rug out from under them is Obama, via the ACA. The insurers would gladly continue to sell the current plan, if they could.
And while the people we’re discussing signed up after the passage of the ACA, and thus can be viewed as being outside Obama’s promise, that too is a technicality. In context, Obama seemed to be saying that the ACA would not force people to change plans against their will, but would only give them added options. The notion that this only applied to plans that were in existence at the time the law was passed is not something that would have occured to an ordinary person who was not following the details of the law and was instead relying on the notion that Obama was an honest man who would not mislead them.
Again, I mostly agree. The ACA certainly restricts consumer options in plans, and some people took the “Keep your plan” promise to mean that nothing would change for most people. The main consumer complaint is the unavailability of those plans in the future, and not the surprise aspect. But I think the surprise aspect is non-trivial.
I happen to think reasonable people should have listened to the whole speech which (at least for the ones I’ve read) made clear that the entire market would be subject to reforms, with some applying even to grandfathered plans. But I understand and find reasonable the contention that the central talking point should be non-misleading even to those who ignore the rest of the context.
Let’s not forget the other side of it though, the promise that premiums would drop by an average of $2500. Even if we’re generous and include subsidies, that one is also unlikely to be kept due to the huge number of mandates the administration imposed on the industry.
There is a tradeoff between affordable care and quality of care. The administration has gone for high quality, which sacrifices affordability.
Do you really mean quality of care? Based on doctors I’ve spoken with (an admittedly small sample), none think quality of care will improve. In fact, all told me that they will be able to spend less time with each patient, be paid less by insurance, and pay more for ACA-related record-keeping and reporting.
If you mean quality of insurance, I still don’t agree when it comes to most people. Yes, the ACA is beneficial to people with pre-existing conditions who were not able to easily buy insurance. But most people will be surprised at the deductibles and copays built into the ACA plans. For my family, the bronze plans generally include $11,000 in family deductible before the insurance picks up a dime, and THEN the insurance only pays 60 percent of bills until we would hit our $12,700 out of pocket maximum. Think about those numbers. An $11k deductible on top of $9k in premiums, and then still pay 40% of medical bills? In what universe is that “affordable”?
Again, for my family, a “gold” plan has a $5,200 deductible and $11,700 out-of-pocket maximum on top of over $14,000 in premiums. How is this “high quality” insurance with such high deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums.
Promises aren’t generally that precise, but it would be hard to believe that an audience of layman wouldn’t perceive the former as what he was promising, and even harder to believe that the salesman-in-chief wouldn’t also know that.
Ok. So we have another statement (characterized as a promise, though I think that’s a stretch as applied here), that we are to understand without considering any context, and as interpreted by the uninformed.
That’s a fine standard for assessing the actual effect of presidential statements–it may well be that a lot of people interpreted it as you suggest. But it seems like a rather poor standard for assessing presidential honesty. Ordinarily, when we assess the honesty of a statement we ask about the speaker’s intended meaning, and if we’re being *really *strict we might ignore intent and ask how a reasonably informed person would have understood it in context. A standard that asks how an uninformed person would have understood it out of context is getting is pretty far afield, IMHO. If we applied that standard across-the-board, every other sentence on the campaign trail would be a lie.
That’s exactly what my situation is (as I documented upthread). The plans available to me are basically what you described, hugely more expensive than my current plan, in premiums, deductibles AND max out of pocket limits, and to add insult to injury, I have to get approvals to get to specialists and the list of doctors I can access is tiny. My current plan is way cheaper AND way better. But it is being canceled, my guess - because it has a $2M lifetime limit.
But any time you post something like this, you get shouted down - after all look, the guy who posted that he just signed up for Obamacare has tiny premiums and almost no deductibles. The fact that the reason for tiny premiums and almost no deductibles is the $10K mooch from federal government just doesn’t matter. Look - it’s “affordable” - for him.
Its not a rug being pulled from under them, its the trap door on a gallows. These people are sold a false sense of security, they think they are insured, and in the technical sense of the word, they are.
In the ruthless world of giving folks the business, this is perfectly ethical, the product is what it says it is, there is no actual lying. They did it for money. Dare we hope that we might one day reach a place where business gives a rat’s ass what they do to our people?
We do dare, do dare.
If the “providers” prove invulnerable to ethical argument, then we must shift our focus to that which they do care about. Money. We can’t make them care about people, but we are obliged to protect our own. And if they are not our people, who’s people are they?
The problem is that if a sales pitch is given so as to hype a benefit that’s not as beneficial as the prospective buyer thinks it is, given his understanding of what’s being promised, then that’s a classic “You didn’t read the fine print” situation.
You are writing as if there was some big secret that just got exposed. But these issues were widely debated before the law was passed. For example, see:
Omitting the parts about screams and the left and who is an adult, we don’t totally disagree about where this is going. It will become part of the American landscape, but, like every other social program, change over time. And the changes can’t go in the direction of fewer Americans being covered.
What I don’t understand is, why were insurance companies still selling non-compliant policies after the law banned them in 2010? Seems pretty simple to grandfather everything before the law, ban new non-compliant policies after the law, and let attrition take care of bad insurance. What happened?
The bulk of the regulations weren’t written until after the election, so except for obvious things like lifetime maxes, insurance companies had no way of knowing what was compliant and what wasn’t.
OK. Were any non-compliant policies issued after the regulations were clear to the insurance industry? I have no problem with grandfathering non-compliant policies issued before the regulations were clear to the insurance industry. Isn’t this an easy fix? Or will Republicans block it in a cynical attempt to destroy Obamacare?
Letting people keep their non-compliant plans doesn’t destroy Obamacare. If it was that crucial for people to lose their health insurance, then there’s no way the President could have issued anything even resembling that promise.
My policy did change from having a $1 or $2 million lifetime limit to having no maximum two years ago. But my premium changed only modestly. As I’ve said, my policy is not “shitty” insurance, contrary to the talking points of the pro-ACA crowd. And yet my premium will go up 90 percent if I choose the most similar ACA plan.
I’m curious how many amongst those who are in favor of the ACA buy their own insurance and pay the full premium. How many of you are delighted at paying out $10k, $12k or $14k in premiums, and then have to cover a multi-thousand dollar deductible? Or are you all covered by (corporate or government) employer-paid policies?
That’s going to be the next “Oh Shit” moment - when businesses see humongous premium hikes and have to start charging their employees more. Or, just as likely, decide to do away with health insurance as a benefit and kick their employees into the .gov system.