If-You-Like-the-Plan-You-Are-in-You-Can-Keep-It Surprise of the Day
Among the problems: Modest increases in cost-sharing, a switch of insurers and even a switch of plans offered by the same insurer will cause employers to lose their “grandfathered” status:
In 14 pages of public comments files Monday with the Department of Labor, the [U.S Chamber of Commerce] said the strict nature of the guidelines will make it “impossible” for the administration to make good on its promise to allow Americans to keep their current coverage.
See the full article on the impossibility of keeping your current health care coverage.
This is very easy to understand. The Obama administration doesn’t want anyone to be grandfathered.
I think Tom is right. Obama Care was sold on the idea that they were going to help out the small minority of people who couldn’t afford insurance. Now it turns out that millions of people will continue to be uninsured under this bill, while they pursue the real goal: regulating the insurance of everybody else.
The administration put out a memorandum a month or so back in which they basically said that eventually no one would be grandfathered.
The strange thing here is that the administration says it really wants to control costs. Yet these actions undermine the goal. Forcing people to have more generous insurance than they really want will result in more spending and higher costs.
This post is mistitled. Surely, no one is tuly surprised.
Keep your own healthcare? Since when has anybody been able to keep their own healthcare. Every health insurance plan goes through an annual dance of benefits and charges and provider networks that you have as much control over as King Cnut had over the tides. You never know if your insurance company suddenly drops your physician or a specialist you’ve been seeing from your network. How suddenly a prescription medication you’ve been taking is suddenly dropped from the preferred list of your PBM, not because the alternative better matches your requirements, but because they make a bigger profit on the replacement. Or how your employer can suddenly change providers so every aspect of getting your medical care changes, from your out of pocket skyrocketing, to your primary care provider, to finding out that the local teaching hospital is now off limits because it’s out of network, but the second rate facility 50 miles away is. This is today’s system, any criticism of the health care law has to keep this in mind.
I fault the Democrats for lying about “if you like it you can keep it”, but it’s hard for me to get too worked up about it because the McCain-Coburn-Ryan proposals would have gutted employer-sponsored plans just as surely. There is simply no way employers could have continued to offer traditional, ERISA/HIPAA-regulated and effectively community-rated plans without the differential tax treatment.