Obama seeks quick law fix
Cancellation balm sought short of a bill
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama directed his aides to look for “administrative solutions” to halt cancellations of individual insurance policies as a result of his health-care law, a spokesman said Friday.
“The president did acknowledge that there are some gaps in the law that need to be repaired,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters traveling with Obama to an event in Louisiana, a day after the president said he’s “sorry” some people are getting cancellation letters from insurers.
White House staff members met at the Capitol on Friday with representatives of top House Democrats to present ideas for changes that wouldn’t require legislation, according to a leadership aide, who asked not to be named because the meeting was private.
Obama and his allies are acting to head off legislative action to alter the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the president’s signature domestic achievement. The Republican-controlled House is poised to vote next week on a measure that would allow health-care plans currently available to continue into next year without penalty. Two Democratic senators, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, also have made proposals to address sign-up delays and canceled policies.
Any legislation may not do the job even if it passes. The reason: States, not
the federal government, regulate the individual insurance market. State insurance commissioners have already approved the plans that will be offered for next year. It may be too late to wind back to where things stood at the beginning of this year.
“It has taken the industry many months to rejigger their systems to comply with the law,” said Bob Laszewski, a health-care-industry consultant. “The cancellation letters have already gone out. What are these guys supposed to do, go down to the post office and buy a million stamps?”
POLITICAL FALLOUT
Last month’s faulty rollout of the website designed to enable Americans to shop for coverage and revelations that hundreds of thousands of people have received cancellation notices from their insurers have driven down Obama’s approval ratings and given ammunition to Republicans opposed to the law.
Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, subpoenaed the Obama administration’s technology chief to testify before the panel Wednesday about the website’s troubles.
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park is “the only invited witness who remains unwilling to appear voluntarily,” Issa said in a letter to Park released Friday night by the panel.
The technical failures and cancellations also have sparked an outcry among some Democratic lawmakers who are up for re-election next year and face the prospect that their Republican opponents will use them as campaign issues.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republicans’ campaign arm, is targeting Democrats, urging them to apologize for the problems with the health-care law. A release entitled “It’s Your Turn to Apologize” went out to dozens of Democratic districts.
Obama’s allies are pushing the White House to make changes, including delaying penalties and extending the enrollment period for the insurance policies. Those kinds of fixes could give Democrats in vulnerable seats a way to acknowledge the problems with the law without undermining one of their party’s major achievements.
The law requires all Americans to be covered next year or pay a penalty. Those who want plans that begin Jan. 1 must enroll by Dec. 15. Many of the plans being canceled don’t meet the coverage requirements under the law and have been changed by insurers since the law took effect in 2010.
“The president has said for years now that he is open to working with members of Congress that have a legitimate interest in trying to strengthen the Affordable Care Act,” Earnest said, adding that the White House prefers executive solutions to congressional legislation.
PRESIDENT’S PLEDGE
The focus appears to be on easing the impact for a specific group: people whose policies have been canceled and who don’t qualify for tax credits to offset higher premiums. The administration has not settled on a particular fix, and it’s possible the final decision would apply to a broader group.
Still, a president can’t just pick up the phone and order the Treasury to cut checks for people suffering from insurance premium sticker shock. Spending would have to be authorized by law.
Another obstacle: Most of the discontinued policies appear to have been issued after the law was enacted, according to insurers and independent experts. Legally, that means they would have never been eligible for cancellation protections offered by the statute.
Obama’s pledge that individuals would be able to keep their coverage and their doctors was a central selling point of his health-care overhaul, aimed at calming consumers concerned that they would be forced to give up policies and doctors they liked as the program expanded coverage to many of the nation’s 48 million uninsured.
In his apology to Americans who are losing coverage as a result of the law, Obama said he’s “sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.
PROVISION IN ACT
Obama previously accused his critics of being “grossly misleading” about how the law works and said those people being thrown off plans that don’t meet the law’s standards will be getting better insurance coverage.
Yet administration officials knew by June 2010 that as many as 10 million people with individual insurance probably would be thrown off existing plans. The cancellations are a result of provisions in the act, which Obama signed into law in March 2010, that say policies that fail to offer benefits such as prescription drug coverage and free preventive care can’t be sold after this year even if they’re cheaper.
As cancellation notices began arriving last month, White House officials argued that just 5 percent of the population is affected and that insurance company practices, not the law, were to blame.
“In this transition, there are going to be folks who get a cancellation letter,” Obama said in the interview. “We have to make sure that they are not feeling as if they’ve been betrayed by an effort that is designed to help them.”
The president invited Landrieu and 14 other Democratic senators facing re-election to a two-hour White House meeting Wednesday to air their complaints. Landrieu also accompanied Obama on his trip to New Orleans.
PRYOR BACKS BILL
Landrieu’s bill would allow people to keep their individual health insurance plans even if they didn’t meet the law’s minimum standards. The plans could be kept only as long as the policyholders made scheduled payments.
Landrieu’s bill also would require insurance companies to tell their customers which parts of their policies didn’t meet the minimum coverage standards for costs of such things as hospitalization or laboratory tests.
As of Friday, Sens. Kay Hagan, D-N.C.; Joe Manchin, D-W. Va.; and Mark Pryor, D-Ark., had signed on. Landrieu, Hagan and Pryor face tough re-election races next year.
Senate Republicans proposed a similar bill last week. Introduced by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., it would allow people to keep any health-care plan they had from the time the Patient Protect Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 through the end of this year. In all, 42 senators support it, all of them Republicans.
The House of Representatives will vote Nov. 15 on its proposed Keep Your Health Plan Act. That bill would allow existing health plans on the individual market to continue next year without any penalty. The House, where Republicans are a majority, has voted repeatedly in favor of bills that would delay or repeal the health-care law.
On Friday, Republicans said the president needed to go further than an apology to make good on his original promise that people could keep their insurance plans if they liked them.
“Sorry isn’t enough, Mr. President,” tweeted Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., referring to a report by the libertarian Manhattan Institute that premiums will increase under the law.
Also on Friday, a requirement of the health-care law that group insurance plans cover contraceptives was ordered blocked by a federal appeals court, the first ban on enforcement of the mandate.
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago returned two cases to trial courts with instructions to enter preliminary injunctions blocking enforcement of the requirement. In a 2-1 decision, the three-judge panel reversed the lower-court decisions in lawsuits brought by Catholic families and their closely held corporations.
“These cases — two among many currently pending in courts around the country — raise important questions about whether business owners and their closely held corporations may assert a religious objection to the contraception mandate and whether forcing them to provide this coverage substantially burdens their religious-exercise rights,” U.S. Circuit Judge Diane Sykes wrote in the majority opinion.
Last week, an appeals court panel in Washington also ruled that the contraceptives mandate may violate religious freedom, as did an appeals court in Denver previously.