It’s all over the headlines - millions of letters have gone out to individual health plan owners saying their plan has been canceled because it doesn’t meet minimum Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) standards. Does this fly in the face of Obama’s repeated promise that those who like their own health plan can keep it? I listened to Sean Hannity’s radio show for a short while today (as much as I could stand) and I found that I agreed with him on one point - Obama lied to us.
There are two sides to this answer, and when one takes them both in to account I find myself agreeing with a lot of criticism from the right. Plans in place before 2010 when the law was passed will stay thanks to a grandfathering clause, and people who have bought individual plans since then are at risk of having them cancelled because they don’t meet ACA standards. Fair enough, ex post facto lawmaking is the standard.
Any idea how many people keep their health plan for more than 3 years, though? I do wish there was an easily available statistic on that. I do know that, even if one retains the same plan, your premiums can go up year-to-year and seemingly at random if you aren’t tuned in to the market. And no one is.
But the result is not what Obama promised. The rhetoric of “keep your plant” does not jive with all the people who’s plans are being replaced. Some 14 million people, give or take, have had their plans canceled, to be replaced by new ACA-compatible ones. For some their premiums will go up. For others their premiums will go down or they will find subsidies are in place to help them. It is disingenuous to say that things stay the same. Part of the problem is incumbent on insurance companies for not making their plans ACA-compatible sooner after then act was passed, or warning their customers sooner of the changes. The rest is on Obama (and Sebelius) for making it seem like this wouldn’t happen.
Perhaps things will get better. Maybe this is the first step towards a more egalitarian country where everyone is covered. Or it might be the end of the world. Time will tell. I don’t know that it’s fruitful to get in to the numbers at this point, since they are almost all projections and estimates. Maybe six months out, or six years out, we’ll have a better idea of how the ACA has impacted the country. It certainly won’t be the end of the world or the United States as we know it, and it’s not “the worst thing since slavery.” (Really?!)
Yet I agree with Hannity.
The problem is that opposition to the act has been nothing but scaremongering since the beginning. Remember death panels? Will it destroy religious freedom as we know it? That they shoved it down our throat with no debate?
(More controversies explained here)
Perhaps if there was less crying wolf I would be more angry at Obama about this. He certainly deserves it. On the other hand, he’s been consistently right about most everything else surrounding the ACA.
Hannity believes all of these myths, and re-stated some of them on his radio show today. Yes, I know Obama has been caught red-handed in a controversy of his own making by over-promising and under-delivering. That doesn’t put him in the right. In the correct, I mean. He’s definitely in the right.
He’s just a broken clock whose time of day it is.
