D.C. Insurance Commissioner Given Walking Papers After Questioning Obamacare Fix

It seems as though a “national
conversation” will not be part of the solution to fixing the
insurance coverage messes that have followed the launch of health
exchanges. The insurance commissioner of Washington, D.C., tried
and is now
looking for a new job. Courtesy of The Washington
Post:

A day after he questioned President Obama’s decision
to unwind a major tenet of the health-care law and said
the nation’s capital might not go along, D.C. insurance
commissioner William P. White was fired.

White was called into a meeting Friday afternoon with one of
Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s (D) top deputies and told that the mayor
“wants to go in a different direction,” White told The
Washington Post on Saturday.

White said the mayoral deputy never said that he was being asked
to leave because of his Thursday statement on health care. But he
said the timing was hard to ignore. Roughly 24 hours later, White
said, he was “basically being told, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ ”

On Thursday, after the president announced that he was going to
try to get insurance companies to delay cancellations for a year of
policies that were not in compliance with the Affordable Care Act’s
coverage requirements, White was one of the people who worried it
would make a bad situation even worse. He issued a statement
agreeing with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners
that the change “threatens to undermine the new market, and may
lead to higher premiums and market disruptions in 2014 and
beyond.”

The statement has been removed from the department’s web site.
Sources tell The Washington Post leaders were upset that
the statement had not been vetted by the mayor’s office before
posting.

Read the whole story
here.

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