At the end of last year,
millions of Americans with individual insurance policies found out
that, thanks to Obamacare, President Obama’s repeated promise that
anyone who liked their health plan could not keep their health plan
was not, in fact, true.
This year, on the eve of a midterm election, it’s about to
happen again for hundreds of thousands of people across the
country.
As the policy news site Morning Consult
notes today, there are reports in multiple states that hundreds
or thousands will see their plans cancelled at the end of the year
as a direct result of not meeting Obamacare’s requirements. Some
14,000 people are expected to lose their current plans in Kentucky,
and another 800 are projected to see their plans cancelled in
Alaska. Both of those states are Senate battlegrounds with close
races.
According to the Albuquerque Journal, about
30,000 people will have their plans cancelled in New Mexico. The
report leaves no question that Obamacare is the culprit, saying the
plans will be cut off because they “don’t meet the standards set by
the health care law.”
Last month, reports surfaced
indicating that, according to estimates produced by the state’s
insurance commission, as many as 250,000 people in Virginia will
lose their existing plans this year.
People who lose their plans are not necessarily doomed to go
without insurance. If they stay on the individual market, they will
have the opportunity to buy new plans through Obamacare’s
exchanges, and those plans may be subsidized. But that’s not what
Obama promised when selling the law. What he said was, “if you like
your plan, you can keep your plan,” not, “if you like your plan, it
may well be cancelled, but you can purchase a different one through
a government-run storefront that federal and state regulators have
deemed compliant.” Administration officials knew full
well that the promise was impossible to keep, much as
Clinton administration advisers knew the same thing during
their push for health care reform in the 1990s. And yet President
Obama went ahead and made the promise anyway, over and over, on
camera, with no caveats, embracing a lie because it was politically
convenient.
The Obama administration’s blame-shifting response to the latest
round of plan cancellations is barely a response at all. A Health
and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson
tells The Hill that “as was the case before the
Affordable Care Act, private insurance companies operate in a free
market: they may choose to discontinue, change, and replace plans
so long as they let their enrollees know their options.”
It is perhaps debatable whether the heavily regulated health
insurance industry can be credibly described as a “free market,”
but it’s true that insurers can and do decide to cancel
plans, and they often did before Obamacare. In this case, however,
the cancellations are a direct result of Obamacare’s rules and
requirements, which were intentionally and explicitly designed to
kill off plans that did not meet the law’s particular
standards.
The HHS spokesperson also notes that last year, under
heavy political pressure after Obama’s obvious and repeated lie
about keeping plans was exposed, the administration issued an
update allowing insurers to keep some many off-limits plans going
through 2016, subject to the approval of state
regulators.
This move, which allows the administration to shift
responsibility for plan cancellations to insurers and state
officials, has been described as a fix, but it’s not much of one:
At most, it postpones the cancellations. Insurers and state
regulators are not deciding whether or not to cancel plans
that do not pass muster under Obamacare; they are merely deciding
when. Ultimately, the law is to blame.
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