The Real Story Behind the Phony Canceled Health Insurance Scandal - MotherJones

[Bill USA]

Insurance companies ripped off Americans for years with lousy health plans. Obamacare was designed to fix that.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/obamacare-canceled-health-insurance

Over the past few weeks, insurers have been sending out hundreds of thousands of notices alerting customers that their current plans won't comply with the ACA as of January 1 and that the owners of these plans need to find alternatives. Republicans and conservatives pointed to the development as evidence that Obama lied. Several prominent right-wingers who were covered under these plans, including Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin, have helped fuel this outcry. When Malkin got her cancelation notice, she went on the Twitter warpath. She later wrote a piece for the National Review slugged, "Obama lied. My health plan died." Malkin had a high-deductible plan from Anthem Blue Cross that doesn't meet the minimum coverage requirements created by the ACA. So she has to get a new plan on the state health exchange. Malkin blamed Obamacare for destroying the individual insurance market.

The media have covered these complaints with gusto, as if the cancelations are a genuine crisis and indication of a failure of Obama's health care law. The ACA was designed specifically to prevent insurance companies from peddling lousy insurance plans and to force these firms to replace these subpar products with affordable plans providing better and effective coverage. The plans being canceled are ending because they offered insufficient coverage—and only a few years ago both Rs and Ds were upset about these kinds of plans. But there's been collective amnesia about the shoddy plans that GOPers have happily exploited in recent days. Perhaps Obama should have said, "Those of you who obtain insurance on the individual market can keep your plans unless it’s the sort of rip-off plan the ACA will forbid. Otherwise, you will be offered new options that actually give you decent coverage at a decent price."

Here's what led to the current situation: In the early aughts, the number of people with employer-based coverage declined dramatically. That left an increasing number of Americans uninsured and about 30 million adults underinsured and at serious financial risk. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that between 2003 and 2010, the number of underinsured Americans nearly doubled.

The fastest growing group of underinsured was people in households around the national median income, the $40,000 to $50,000 annual income range—folks who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but who don't have employer-sponsored plans or who can't afford the ones they're offered. Insurance companies jumped into the void with a lot of products Consumer Reports dubbed "junk insurance." These were plans that barely qualified as insurance because they had very low caps on coverage or weren't even really insurance at all. Many were merely medical discount programs that didn't protect against health-related financial calamity. Insurance companies, including many of the biggest, marketed these products aggressively and often misleadingly—which was made easier by the lack of disclosure requirements in the sale of health insurance. Regulators struggled to protect consumers because so many of the junk plans were perfectly legal.

[mercuryblues]

1. glad Malkin made her stupidity so public

from TP

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/11/07/2906861/major-insurance-company-lawsuit/

A major California insurance company is being sued by two consumers alleging that they were tricked into dropping their health coverage when they could have remained on their preferred plans under Obamacare, the Los Angeles Times reports.

<snip>

California’s Anthem Blue Cross may have convinced their customers that they fall into the second category — even though they’re actually in the first.

“Blue Cross successfully enticed tens of thousands of its individual policyholders to switch out of their grandfathered health plans and forever lose their protected grandfathered status,” states the lawsuit. “Blue Cross concealed information about the consequences of switching plans and intentionally misled its policyholders to encourage the replacement of grandfathered policies.”

[JanT]

3. just the private insurance companies doing what the do best-

scamming the public. which they have been doing for years.

[BridgeTheGap]

2. The Obama administration made a mistake in making these statements. It is their responsibility to

educate people about the law. To say "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan," is simply not true in many cases. The fact that the law itself, requires that a number of plans be dropped (for good reason), flies directly in the face of this statement. They should have recognized this. It does appear to be a case of telling people what they wanted to hear rather than informing them of what the law would actually require. I think administration took this route because of the sound bite age we live in. To have explained to people what was getting ready to happen might have taken a paragraph, maybe a little more. Opting for this sound bite has left them with looking stupid or dishonest.

[ThoughtCriminal]

4. Calling these junk plans "Insurance"

is like saying cars sold without engines are still "vehicles" because they could be towed or pushed.

[Bill USA]

5. I like your comparison. I can't find it now, but somewhere i said these fake insurance plans are

.. like buying a car with holes in the floor for your feet .. to provide the power to enable you to go somewhere. (!)

(looked around for it but can't find it, damn!).

[ThoughtCriminal]

6. Flintstones Tech

Like Lewis Black said. We're dealing with people show think the Flinstones was a documentary.