By Michael D. Tanner
Michael D. Tanner
Last week roughly 250,000 Virginians began receiving notices that their health insurance was being canceled because it failed to meet all the mandates and other regulatory requirements of Obamacare. They are likely to be just the first in a new wave of Americans who are being thrown off their current insurance plan — even if they like it, to recall President Obama’s now inoperative promise.
You will recall that last fall, roughly 6 million Americans were kicked off their insurance because their plans failed to offer a lengthy-enough maternity stay, didn’t provide sufficient drug and alcohol rehabilitation benefits, or otherwise fell short of the insurance that federal bureaucrats thought that they should have. Of course, all but roughly 1 million eventually found other insurance, although in many cases the new insurance was more expensive or no longer covered their preferred doctors and hospitals.
In response to the public outcry, President Obama unilaterally decided to allow people with non-Obamacare-compliant insurance to keep their plans for an extra year, provided that both their state insurance commissioner and their insurance company agreed to go along. This past March, the president extended to 2017 the time that Americans would have to bring their insurance plans into compliance with Obamacare or lose them.
However, 22 states, including New York, California, and Virginia, chose not to go along with the extension, meaning residents with non-compliant plans lost their coverage and were forced to enroll in new Obamacare plans. The exceptions were those who were able to renew their non-compliant plans prior to the effective start date for Obamacare, October 1 of last year. Unfortunately, those plans are now again coming up for renewal, meaning they are no longer compliant. Hence, 250,000 Virginians, and perhaps millions more Americans in other states, are out of luck.
“Obamacare’s mandates are coming due for millions of Americans.”
It should be noted that, as with previous cancellations, those Americans who lose their plans because of Obamacare will most likely find new insurance. But a new study from the National Center for Public Policy Research found that, on average, Obamacare plans were worse than the plans they replaced, in terms of both providers covered and cost-sharing.
The study compared plans sold on the individual market in 2013, prior to Obamacare, with plans sold through Obamacare exchanges in ten major metropolitan areas. In general, Obamacare plans had more restrictive networks and required …read more
Source: OP-EDS
Recent Comments