The morning tv talk shows were a disappointment for me today.
Even the moderators used remarks that took the GOP stance of conflating
the Obamacare website performance and President Obama’s pledge
that "if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it".
Here is a more realistic view:
NY Times
Editorial
11/2/13
Insurance Policies Not Worth Keeping
Quote:
Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that.
By law, insurers cannot continue to sell policies that don’t provide
the minimum benefits and consumer protections required as of next year.
So they’ve sent cancellation notices to hundreds of thousands of people
who hold these substandard policies.
(At issue here are not the 149 million people covered by employer plans, but the
10 million to 12 million people who buy policies directly on the individual market.)<snip>
But insurers are not allowed to abandon enrollees.
They must offer consumers options that do comply with the law,
and they are scrambling to retain as many of their customers as possible with new policies
that are almost certain to be more comprehensive than their old ones.
Indeed, in all the furor, people forget how terrible many of the
soon-to-be-abandoned policies were. Some had deductibles as high
as $10,000 or $25,000 and required large co-pays after that,
and some didn’t cover hospital care.
This overblown controversy has also obscured the crux of what
health care reform is trying to do, which is to guarantee that everyone
can buy insurance without being turned away or charged exorbitant rates
for pre-existing conditions and that everyone can receive benefits that
really protect them against financial or medical disaster, not illusory benefits
that prove inadequate when a crisis strikes.<snip>
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