This is a pretty good explanation of what went wrong and who's to blame. The only obvious flaw is that this writer still thinks that private insurance isn't as good as Obama Care and I believe that will become the 'new lie' in about six months. Wait for it.
By Rick Newman : We may now know what the most devastating statement of
Barack Obama’s presidency is going to be:
“If you like it, you can keep
it.”
Obama has said that repeatedly about people who have health insurance
as of January 1, 2014, when the major provisions of the Affordable Care
Act go into effect. Yet insurers have been canceling hundreds of
thousands of policies because their terms don’t comply with new
requirements of the health-reform law. T
hat makes Obama look like he was
either fibbing or didn’t know the ramifications of his own law. And it
comes on top of humiliating snafus at
Healthcare.gov, the website that’s supposed to make it easy to sign up for Obamacare but has been
plagued by recurring outages
even a month after going live on October 1. (On Wednesday Secretary of
Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius apologized for the
"miserably frustrating" tech snafus during a Capitol Hill hearing.)
The firestorm over cancellations represents much more than a PR
problem for supporters of the ACA, because
millions of Americans could
find themselves without insurance as the federal program that was
supposed to represent a better alternative malfunctions, leaving no
practical alternatives. I
n retrospect, it seems obvious the experts
implementing the ACA should have seen this coming. Yet the cancellation
controversy reveals how Washington policymakers basically disregarded
the very people — those who purchase individual insurance plans because
they can’t get affordable coverage through an employer — who were bound
to suffer the most disruption caused by the sweeping health-care reform
law.
Obama has acknowledges "glitches" with the ACA rollout and said he
takes "full responsibility" for fixing them. He continues to insist,
however, that the new law will vastly improve access to care for
millions who couldn't afford it before. And in a recent speech in
Boston, he pointed out that one goal of the program was to secure better
care for people paying sizable premiums for barely-there coverage. "One
of the things health care reform was designed to do was to help not
only the uninsured, but the underinsured," he said.
What he should have said
Still, Obama would be on much firmer ground if he had modified his
now-notorious guarantee by saying, “If you have insurance through your
employer and you like it, you can keep it.”
Most big companies offer
plans thorough enough to meet the requirements of the ACA, and there is,
in fact, no reason for that type of coverage to change under the law.
For years, employers have been charging their workers more for
insurance, raising deductibles and making other changes to adapt to the
skyrocketing cost of care. But most such changes have nothing to do with
Obamacare.
(Z: but, of course, in this case, costs have never been THIS skyrocketing or so SUDDEN)
It’s a different story in the market for individual policies, which
are typically purchased by the self-employed, people who work for small
companies that don’t offer insurance and others who don’t work. This is a
small portion of the health-insurance market, which might explain why
Obama and his advisers didn’t give it much thought at the outset. Only
about 15 million Americans are insured through an individual policy,
according to the
Kaiser Family Foundation,
while 10 times as many — 150 million people — get health insurance
through an employer. (Most other Americans either get coverage through a
government program or go without.) White House spokesman Jay Carney has
tried to
downplay the cancellation flap by pointing out repeatedly that the individual market represents just 5% of Americans.
Those folks don’t have very good coverage, either. A
2012 study published in Health Affairs found
that 51% of people with individual policies — nearly 8 million
Americans — receive a level of coverage, dubbed “tin,” that’s lower than
the cheapest plan offered under the Affordable Care Act, typically
known as “bronze.” Overall, individual policies typically cover just 60%
of medical expenses, leaving the patient to pay more than $4,100 in
average medical costs each year. Group plans offered through employers
typically cover 83% of expenses, resulting in much lower out-of-pocket
costs of just $1,765 per year, on average.
New rules contained in the ACA require insurers to offer minimum
coverage levels that are greater than what many individual plans offer.
With a few exceptions, that means the ACA will basically prohibit the
bare-bones coverage offered in tin plans and even some slightly more
generous policies, beginning January 1. Even though insurance experts
estimate that as many as 10 million people could lose coverage as a
result, dealing with the blowback seems to have been an afterthought
within the Obama administration.
Since individual plans are generally inferior to more-generous group
plans, the architects of the Affordable Care Act may have assumed most
people with such plans would be grateful for a chance to buy
more-comprehensive coverage on one of the new exchanges. Some people
with shoddy individual plans will even qualify for better coverage that
costs less than they were paying, thanks to federal subsidies meant to
help those with low incomes buy decent coverage.
An unanticipated uproar
But Obama and his advisers obviously failed to anticipate the uproar
that would occur as people expecting no change to their insurance began
to open notices from their carriers explaining their policies were being
canceled. The abrupt nature of the cancellations surely hasn’t helped
either, especially since Obama was insistent about coverage remaining
intact for those who want it. On top of that, people losing individual
coverage who want to find replacement coverage through an exchange must
now navigate a broken-down website and
a bumbling bureaucracy that makes
the DMV look good.
Higher-income people losing individual coverage will also be forced
to pay considerably more for insurance under the ACA, since they won’t
qualify for a subsidy. They’ll probably get much better coverage than
they had before
(Z: that is THE biggest bunch of BS EVER EVER EVER), but the higher costs will probably lead some to opt for
no coverage at all, even if it means paying a $95 fine (or 1% of their
household income, whichever is higher) in 2014. (The fine, by the way,
would be extracted from your tax refund and it would be possible to
completely avoid it if you didn't get money back from the government for 2014 and beyond.)
If enough people choose to forgo coverage, it seems inevitable that,
before long, we’ll hear about somebody with a medical emergency who
ended up without insurance because it got canceled under the ACA, and
who must now drain their savings or tap relatives to pay for
catastrophic care that would be covered if not for the ACA. Obama might
want to think ahead and start preparing an explanation for how that
could have happened under a law meant to expand, not restrict,
health-care coverage.
It might also be a good idea to stop making any promises at all about a law that keeps catching its own progenitors by surprise.
Rick Newman’s latest book is Rebounders: How Winners Pivot From Setback To Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.
THIS, I believe, is a rather unbiased, factual article (except the stupidity that people with a lot of money and private insurance will get better coverage than they have under Obama Care..RIDICULOUS!)
Got any stories you want to share about your insurance, or a friend's or family member's? How are things going in the health insurance segment of YOUR life?
Z
