Senior White House officials held a conference call with reporters before President Obama's
announcement of an administrative fix for insurance cancellations to explain how that fix would work. Essentially, the federal government won't enforce the regulations on individual and small group health policies for one year. State insurance commissioners will be informed to allow consumers already in these plans to stay in them for a year.
Like the Landrieu bill, would require that insurers doing so notify their customers of what they're missing out of if they don't enroll in a new plan. It also requires that insurers inform these customers that they options on the health insurance exchange and might be eligible for a subsidy. Like the Landrieu bill, and unlike the House Republicans' bill, it will not allow insurers to sell these older, substandard plans to new customers. But unlike Landrieu, it does not compel insurers to keep the old plans. It also doesn't force them to rescind the cancellations that they've already made.
This, of course, has the insurance companies (and Republicans) outraged! He's making the insurance companies the enemy! (About damned time, I say.) If they don't take him up on this extension, and go ahead and cancel policies, everyone is going to blame them. They're also saying that it would be impossible to do (even though they're not forced to).
Insurance source: WH fix places "onus on us even tho they know we can't" effectively extend cancelled policies given rates/logistics probs
— @JohnJHarwood
Which everyone knows is bullshit. If there's once thing that insurance companies are really good at, it's figuring out how to rescind things. If they can scour a customer's health history to find the acne treatment from 30 years ago that would give them an excuse to cancel a policy, they can figure out how to rescind a policy cancellation. And, of course, this would be voluntary. They don't have to keep offering shitty policies, but they can. Of course, if they don't, they'll have angry customers. Which also isn't a new thing for health insurance companies.
As to the policy concern that this will keep younger, healthier people out of the marketplace because they can keep their own insurance, the officials on the press call disputed it, pointin out that the people buying on the individual market skew older; 40 percent of the individual market is aged 45-64, and more than 50 percent of family plans are aged 45-64. Which points out what would be the most straightforward fix for these people: let them buy in to Medicare! House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi says that House Democrats are coming up with their own bill to respond to Upton's. It should be Medicare buy in.