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Overnight Open Thread (10-31-2013) - Halloween Edition »
October 31, 2013
Our Devious, Incompetent President Has Lied Us Into Class War Open Thread
If you like your hospital and doctors, you can keep your hospital and doctor.
Except you can't.
Oh well! Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet!
Oh, and the Administration is, get this, still lying when it claims that only people in the individual market will be losing their insurance. In fact, more than half of all people in the employer markets will be losing their insurance, too. That's the mid-range estimate; it could be lower.
It could also be higher.
Mid-range estimate: 51% of employer-sponsored plans will get canceled
But Carney’s dismissal of the media’s concerns was wrong, on several fronts. [This refers to Carney's, get this, false characterization of a Federal Register estimate as only concerning individual market policies. -- ace.] Contrary to the reporting of NBC, the administration’s commentary in the Federal Register did not only refer to the individual market, but also the market for employer-sponsored health insurance.
Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains what’s called a “grandfather” provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them. But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.
“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and get canceled. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.
Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and get canceled....
How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.
The individual market insurance policyholders are the first victims of Obamacare.
But they will not be last.