Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Revised and expanded. Did your health insurance that you thought President Obama promised you could keep just get canceled? If so, or you have a friend in that predicament, Republican candidate for the U.S. House Ryan Zinke wants to know — and he wants to know badly enough that he’s trolling Facebook hoping to hook your story:
I’m sure he’ll find at least one person whose plan was canceled because it couldn’t qualify as a legal plan under the Affordable Care Act. As the Los Angeles Times observed yesterday:
The cancellations have caused a new wave of outrage against the law and President Obama, who repeatedly pledged that “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.”
Obama clearly overpromised — not everyone can keep the plans they’ve signed up for since the new law passed. That’s because one laudable purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to eliminate threadbare health plans that covered too little and left policyholders vulnerable to bankruptcy in the event of a major illness or injury. The president should have stated more plainly that some plans wouldn’t pass muster.
And as Dylan Scott reported at Talking Points Memo this morning, some insurance companies that canceled ACA noncompliant policies are failing to advise holders of canceled policies of their options under the ACA:
Across the country, insurance companies have sent misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into the companies’ own, sometimes more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces — which could lead to people like Donna spending thousands more for insurance than the law intended. In some cases, mentions of the marketplace in those letters are relegated to a mere footnote, which can be easily overlooked.
The extreme lengths to which some insurance companies are going to hold on to existing customers at higher price, as the Affordable Care Act fundamentally re-orders the individual insurance market, has caught the attention of state insurance regulators.
The insurance companies argue that it’s simply capitalism at work. But regulators don’t see it that way. By warning customers that their health insurance plans are being canceled as a result of Obamacare and urging them to secure new insurance plans before the Obamacare launched on Oct. 1, these insurers put their customers at risk of enrolling in plans that were not as good or as affordable as what they could buy on the marketplaces.
Will Zinke also seek out "The insurance company screwed me" horror stories?
I can’t countenance Obama’s over-promising, but I can provide some context. After Bill Clinton’s health care debacle 20 years ago, researchers found that Americans with generally good health care plans obtained through their employers feared they would be stripped of what they knew and liked and forced into a strange system with inferior benefits. That backlash killed Hillarycare. Subsequently, most Democrats concluded that health care reform had to grandfather-in existing employer provided insurance that met basic standards. Hence, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” The fine print was there, but one needed a microscope to read it.
Overall, the ACA honors the “…you can keep it” pledge. I’m willing to cut Obama some slack on this, but I wish he would do a better job, a much better job, of explaining why the policies being cancelled are the kind of policies that never should have been allowed to be sold in the first place. And he needs to blow the whistle on those insurance companies that are trying to sucker their customers into purchasing policies that are more expensive than policies available on the health care exchanges.
Zinke has a much more difficult task awaiting him when he finds a person with a cancelled policy who’s willing to complain in public to help Zinke. What health care policy does Zinke support that would help this “Obamacare victim” more than an ACA compliant health insurance policy that probably qualifies for a significant subsidy? Where does Zinke part company with the GOP’s current health care plan? Said GOP plan being the status quo ante (a polite term for “You’re on your own. Don’t get sick, but if you do, die fast.”).