Obama tries to revive health-care plan
Only 106,000 bought insurance in October
In a move to save his signature health-care program and also reverse his sinking popularity, U.S. President Barack Obama announced changes Thursday to the Affordable Care Act that will allow eligible Americans to keep their cancelled health plans for another year.
“I said that I would do everything we can to fix this problem and today I’m offering an idea that will help do it,” he told a news conference.
Thousands of Americans have lost their coverage or will have to pay higher premiums because of problems with the rollout of what’s come to be called “Obamacare.” Obama has essentially been caught in a political squeeze caused by the failed launch of the plan’s website and his inflated promise that no one would lose their private health-care insurance as a result of the new law.
Problems with the website have made it difficult for Americans to sign up for Obamacare, even as insurance companies cancel their policies because those policies no longer meet the legal requirements that all insurance plans provide broader coverage.
Many Americans, who were supposed to have found better, trustworthy insurance policies through Obamacare, now find themselves without any health-care plan at all.
Only 106,000 people bought insurance on the Obamacare insurance exchanges in October when registration began. The White House now admits the program will fall well short of the expected 800,000 by the end of November.
Blame has fallen on the faulty website. But the slow enrolment is not necessarily surprising given the complexity of the market-based reforms. Obamacare is fashioned after Massachusetts’s health-care system, which enrolled only 123 people in its first month but six years later is considered a success. (Ironically, the program was introduced under former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney when he was the state’s governor. At the time, it had broad support from federal Republican lawmakers.)
The problem with allowing people to keep their private plans for another year is that it could further slow enrolment in Obamacare. This would reduce the pool of policyholders, which would increase insurance rates. Were that to happen, the entire program could collapse.
Throughout an hour-long press conference, Obama appeared defensive and at one point apologized for misleading Americans when he previously promised that “if you like your plan, you can keep it.”
He went on to admit, “we fumbled the rollout on this health-care bill,” adding that he has to “win back the confidence of the American people.” One poll this week shows his approval rating has sunk to an all-time low of 39 per cent, with 54 per cent disapproving.
He vowed, however, not to bow to mounting pressure from Republicans to trash the law or weaken it. Website glitches, he said, must not be allowed to negate the goal of helping the 41 million Americans who have no health-care insurance.
“Americans who are having a difficult time, who are poor, many of them working, may have a disability, they’re Americans like everybody else, and the fact that they are now able to get insurance is going to be critically important,” he said.
The plan is also designed help the 13 million people who have dicey, fine-print plans that, in Obama’s words, too often “work fine as long as you stay healthy.”
In most cases, these are the plans insurance companies are cancelling. The reason is simple. They don’t meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
Obamacare makes it illegal to deny coverage to children or for preexisting conditions or to cut off a policyholder after an illness. It also makes it illegal to force a person into bankruptcy because of unpaid hospital bills. Health-care costs are the No. 1 source of personal bankruptcy in the U.S.
The White House is still struggling to get the program’s website working. Obama indicated that its complexities mean the website may not be at 100 per cent for several months.
He sidestepped personal blame, however, claiming he was “not informed directly that the website was not ready.” He added that he would not have launched it had he known this.
One of the lead contractors on the website is the Canadian company CGI of Montreal. It has come under attack from lawmakers who wonder why the U.S. awarded such an important contract to a foreign company when it has plenty of expertise at home.