Obama's "Fix" Totally Illegal, But You Knew That

There is a wrinkle you might not have thought of, though.

First, Jonathan Adler notes that Obama is not purporting to change the law. He can't. Or, he daren't. What he's doing is saying he won't enforce the law -- the law still says that the old policies are illegal. Obama's just saying he'll give insurers a pass, and won't enforce the law against them.

Presumably, he also won't enforce the law against citizens buying these Illegal Policies, either.

But here's the wrinkle-- why on earth would an insurance company conduct an illegal action just because a lawless President swears it's okay? Adler thinks it through:

Yet even if state commissioners approve the plans, they will still be illegal under federal law. Given this fact, why would any insurance company agree to renew such a plan? It’s nice that regulators may forbear enforcing the relevant regulatory requirements, but this is not the only source of potential legal jeopardy. So, for instance, what happens when there’s a legal dispute under one of these policies? Say, for instance, an insurance company denies payment for something that is not covered under the policy but that would have been covered under the PPACA and the insured sues? Would an insurance company really want to have to defend this decision in court? After all, this would place the insurance company in the position of seeking judicial enforcement of an illegal insurance policy.

As has been noted by many, Obama's best-case scenario here is he pretends insurance companies are free to offer the old policies, but, because they don't wish to break the law, they refuse to do so. Then Obama is in a win-win position: He can claim this isn't due to his own actions (I gave insurers the Secret Wink to break the law!) and yet keeps as many people as possible in the expensive, hidden-subsidy exchanges, to subsidize the sick and keep Obamacare afloat.

This is worthless, a pure political piece-of-shit deception. Obama is, get this, lying again.

The only way to even have a chance to get these policies offered is if they're officially legal, like legal legal, not illegal, but I'll ignore it for now "legal."

posted by Ace at 04:42 PM

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