You Can Keep Your Health Insurance: Was Obama Lying, or Ignorant?
Here is my health insurance cancellation letter, cancelling the insurance I was very happy with. Click on any of the below to enlarge
Here was roughly what I was paying for a family of four (this is from the renewal 18 months ago but it is about the same now). We had a couple of minor pre-existing conditions so this was rated up from the lowest possible price of $525.85, or about a 6.6% increase.
Here are the features of this plan. It has a high deductible, but once the deductible is met, it covers 100% in network, and the network is very good. The deductible amounts may be high to some. I asked myself, "what level of unexpected medical cost could I handle in a year." and set the limits there. It is NOT pre-paid medical care, which I do not believe in.
To the question of "was Obama lying or was he ignorant", I cannot get inside his head but I can say that many people, including me, who were not involved in the process saw this coming even in 2009 in his draft legislation. It is hard to believe that if random folks like myself understand this, that the person actually sponsoring the legislation did not.
Many folks are arguing it has to have been an out-and-out lie.
None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.
Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”
That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.
Enter the lies:
Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”
“This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” said Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consultant who works for health industry firms. Laszewski estimates that 80 percent of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.
Next step for me, I get to experience the exchange. I recognized a bunch of business losses last year, so my income was less than zero (I have a s-corp which passes earnings through to my individual tax statement). It will be interesting to see if I get offered a subsidy. Heck, they may offer to enroll me in Medicare.
