Obamacare Is Radically Changing The Individual Insurance Market — And That’s A Very Good Thing [View all]

[Mass]

In this atmosphere of doom, this is an article that is worth reading.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/10/29/2850701/coverage-good-thing/

Reading and watching this morning’s news coverage about individuals and families receiving notices that their current health care plans don’t meet the minimum requirements of the Affordable Care Act, you’d think that insurers have never before cancelled people’s health care coverage. It’s as if the the individual health care market had offered substantive and comprehensive insurance before the law came along in 2010 and forced the good and trusted folks at Wellpoint, Aetna, Cigna, or United Health to suddenly undo your plan.
So it’s easy to forget in all the decontextualized reporting why the law’s minimum standards were written in the first place and what kind of policies they’re seeking to regulate.

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Healthy people benefited from a system that denied coverage to the (relatively) sick — but only if they never incurred medical expenses themselves. If they fell ill or began incurring substantial cost, companies would find any reason to cancel their plans — often by claiming that they failed to reveal a major medical condition. (Theoretically, federal law protects consumers from rescission and policy cancellations that are arbitrary, but companies often “do not follow federal standards and instead follow state laws that offer weaker consumer protections.”)

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Remember, this was a system in which more than 60 percent of medical bankruptcies occurred to people who already had insurance: the coverage just wasn’t good enough and shifted too much cost to the consumer.

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So Obama’s promise — if you like your coverage you can keep it — was missing several key caveats. It’s true that most individuals enrolled in employer based plans can maintain their policies — those plans already meet the new requirements. But for Americans in the individual health care market who have policies that don’t provide you with comprehensive insurance or have substantially changed since 2010, the regulations in the Affordable Care Act mean that you will not be able to keep what you have. Instead, you’ll have to enroll in something better.