When I was starting my professional career, I drove a ten-year-old Nissan Sentra. It was serviceable, but it had problems; if I wanted to accelerate uphill I had to turn off the air conditioner. The back window could not be rolled down…actually it could, but it could not be rolled up again unless two people were involved: one to press their hands against the inside and outside and sort of pull up, and one to roll.
I could have spent more money and gotten a better car, of course, but I wanted to save money for a house, and I was willing to endure the problems that driving a semi-crappy car entailed.
The effect of the ACA is to say, in effect, “We’re not going to let you drive a crappy car. You must have a car that meets these certain minimum standards.”
And that is, of course, within the purview of government to do. We already tell people, “We’re not going to let you work for less than this minimum wage, even if you are willing to. You may not have any job as a result, but any job you do have will be minimally compliant with this wage floor.”
So we can certainly tell people, “You can no longer accept that old insurance policy. You must have one that meets these minimums.”
I have two objections to this, though. The first is one of personal freedom: I admit the government has the power to mandate such things; I feel they should not.
The second is that during the debate about the adoption of the ACA, people expressed fear that something like this would happen. And the President’s response was that such a fear was unwarranted: if you like your current plan, he famously intoned, you can keep it. He did not allude to the fact that this was not true unless your current plan met the minimum standard the government wished to enforce.
Still, elections have consequences. If you elect a candidate who promises to push for health care reform, no one should be all that shocked to discover that he in fact pushes for health care reform.
I don’t think, though, that it’s fair to dismiss the claims of the people who were told they could keep their plans, and now discover they can’t, by telling them that their new plan is more expensive but better. They didn’t want more expensive, any more than I wanted a big car payment back then. I was content to drive my so-so Nissan; they were content to have their so-so health plans. This thread asks for specific examples of people that experienced this kind of problem, and it seems to me you’re trying to defend the law that mandated the change rather than acknowledging that, for some people, it wasn’t what they were told would happen.
