USA TODAY International Edition
No fast fix for insurance cancellations
Administration’s ideas might ‘ make things worse’
President Obama has vowed to do something to help people whose insurance policies have been canceled because they don’t meet the new minimum benefit requirements set by the Affordable Care Act.
But health care and insurance analysts say Obama faces a mountain of complications in his hunt for an administrative fix for the problem — something the president has suggested he will seek to allay the concerns of some of the thousands of Americans who have received cancellation notices in recent weeks. “I just can’t see an administrative fix that doesn’t make things worse,” said Timothy Jost, an expert on health care law at the Washington and Lee University law school in Lexington, Va.
The situation was complicated for Obama when former president Bill Clinton weighed in during an interview Tuesday with the website OZY . com. Clinton said people should be allowed to keep the insurance they have — even if it means Obama has to make changes to the law.
“I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, that the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they’ve got,” Clinton said.
White House press secretary Jay Carney downplayed Clinton’s remarks during his daily press briefing Tuesday, arguing the 42nd president’s comments are in line with Obama’s statement last week that he has tasked his staff with finding a solution to the problem.
Clinton has been a strong supporter of Obama’s health care legislation. The comments come after Obama said Thursday that he is sorry that some Americans are losing their current health insurance plans as a result of the ACA.
House Republicans seized on Clinton’s comment and made the case that Obama should get behind legislation that would grandfather all plans as of Jan. 1, 2013, not March 23, 2010. The House is likely to consider the bill later this week, and similar legislation has been floated in the Senate codifying Obama’s promise that if consumers had insurance they liked, they could keep it after the ACA became the law.
“These comments signify a growing recognition that Americans were misled when they were promised that they could keep their coverage under President Obama’s health care law,” said House Speaker John Boehner, R- Ohio. Carney declined to say if Obama’s considering backing any of the legislation in Congress.
But Jost said such legislation could create a situation where sick people purchase insurance policies that comply with the ACA, while healthy people who are on the individual insurance market can insist on staying on policies that are cheaper but don’t comply with the law. “That’s just not a tenable insurance risk pool situation,” Jost said. “You would essentially end up with one low- risk pool and one high- risk group.”
The ACA established a minimum bar requiring that insurers, among other things, offer preventive care without co- payments, provide maternity care and not refuse applicants with pre- existing conditions.
The ACA “grandfathered” insurance plans that existed in March 2010 prior to the Affordable Care Act becoming law, allowing those insurers to sell coverage even if their lessrobust plans didn’t meet the health law’s requirements as long as the policy was not significantly changed.
But in an ever- changing market — particularly the individual market, where turnover is historically high — millions have seen major changes to their policies and have received cancellation notices from their insurers. The Department of Health and Human Services expected as much in June 2010, when it released guidance projecting as many as 67% of individual market policies would lose grandfathered status by the following year.