Right wing scare tactic #674: cancelling your insurance because of Obamacare
by digby
I knew this was going to freak people out:
A top Florida Blue official said Wednesday that the cancellation of 300,000 individual health insurance policies does not mean affected customers will lose coverage. Rather, it's part of a "transition" to the Affordable Care Act.
Those customers, though, will receive notice by mail that their existing policy is no longer available and they should reach out to the Jacksonville-based company for guidance.
The canceled policies are those that don’t offer coverage broad enough to be considered as "qualified health plans" under the Affordable Care Act. Qualified plans must include coverage for things like maternity and newborn care, mental health, substance abuse services and emergency services, among other things.
“Essentially, we have to put them into plans that are filed an approved as qualified health plans,” said Jon Urbanek, one of the company’s senior vice presidents.
The Times-Union reported the cancelations Tuesday, but company officials were unavailable to answer follow-up questions.
Health insurance companies across the country have been going through similar cancellations as they remove plans that are not qualified plans.
This happened in California too. I know that because it happened to me. (I wrote about it here.)
I can't vouch for the letters in Florida, but mine said they were cancelling my insurance because of Obamacare's requirements for more comprehensive coverage than I was carrying. But it also said they could put me into a new plan that costs almost twice as much as my old plan. It then had a long passage about how I can go on the exchange and buy new insurance and that I may qualify for subsidies and that they are offering some plan on the exchanges that I might like which would provide seamless coverage with my current providers. It then said that I could do nothing, they'll enroll me in a new plan at twice the premium and everything would be hunky dory. If you don't understand what's going on it could look bad, depending on your point of view. At first glance all you see is that you're being cancelled because of Obamacare and any new insurance is going to cost twice as much. Because of Obamacare.
The good news is that only a small portion of the population, those who already have health insurance in the private market, are getting letters like this and I would guess that it's only those who currently have lousy plans who are seeing the sticker shock. Until you can calculate your subsidies, it produces a bit of anxiety.
I'm not sure how this aspect of it could have been done differently. Maybe more lead time for people to absorb the changes would have been helpful. But for those most in need --- the one's who have no insurance at all --- "more lead time" could be life-threatening. Maybe there could have been a better education program for people who are on the private insurance market, but I'm not sure who could have done that. It certainly wasn't going to be the insurance companies. The way the letter from mine reads, they are hedging their bets and hoping that some people will just pay the higher premiums either out of ignorance or some misguided belief that they are getting better coverage by staying out of the exchanges. Let's just say that they aren't exactly being clear.
Still, the above article from Florida shows that the right wing hysteria over "cancelled policies" from Obamacare is manipulative and misleading. Yes, people are technically losing their current policy. But they are being offered better policies, either from their insurance companies directly (at higher premiums) or ones that will be cheaper if they go to the exchange and qualify for subsidies, as most of them will. (One assumes that wealthier people already have high quality plans that include all the required coverage, so their insurance shouldn't be going up substantially.)
The federal web site problems are the focus of most of the sturm und drang over the rollout so far. But there are probably a bunch of confusing stories like this one that are happening at the local level and are making it difficult for people to understand what's going on. But as I've written before, the people who are in the private insurance market already are the best educated about it and are the most likely to hang in there as the system comes on line. The money involved is so substantial that even the right wing ideologues who are shrieking and complaining about the whole thing will very likely end up going through the exchanges simply because they can't afford not to.
If they refuse to do that out of some misguided political tribalism, that's on them.
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