The Real Story Behind the Phony Canceled Health Insurance Scandal - MotherJones

[Bill USA]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/obamacare-canceled-health-insurance
(emphases my own)


Over the past few weeks, insurers have been sending out hundreds of thousands of notices alerting customers that their current plans won't comply with the ACA as of January 1 and that the owners of these plans need to find alternatives. Republicans and conservatives pointed to the development as evidence that Obama lied. Several prominent right-wingers who were covered under these plans, including Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin, have helped fuel this outcry. When Malkin got her cancelation notice, she went on the Twitter warpath. She later wrote a piece for the National Review slugged, "Obama lied. My health plan died." Malkin had a high-deductible plan from Anthem Blue Cross that doesn't meet the minimum coverage requirements created by the ACA. So she has to get a new plan on the state health exchange. Malkin blamed Obamacare for destroying the individual insurance market.

The media have covered these complaints with gusto, as if the cancelations are a genuine crisis and indication of a failure of Obama's health care law. The ACA was designed specifically to prevent insurance companies from peddling lousy insurance plans and to force these firms to replace these subpar products with affordable plans providing better and effective coverage. The plans being canceled are ending because they offered insufficient coverage—and only a few years ago both Rs and Ds were upset about these kinds of plans. But there's been collective amnesia about the shoddy plans that GOPers have happily exploited in recent days. Perhaps Obama should have said, "Those of you who obtain insurance on the individual market can keep your plans unless it’s the sort of rip-off plan the ACA will forbid. Otherwise, you will be offered new options that actually give you decent coverage at a decent price."


Here's what led to the current situation: In the early aughts, the number of people with employer-based coverage declined dramatically. That left an increasing number of Americans uninsured and about 30 million adults underinsured and at serious financial risk. [font color="red"]The Commonwealth Fund estimates that between 2003 and 2010, the number of underinsured Americans nearly doubled. [/font]

The fastest growing group of underinsured was people in households around the national median income, the $40,000 to $50,000 annual income range—folks who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but who don't have employer-sponsored plans or who can't afford the ones they're offered. [font color="red"]Insurance companies jumped into the void with a lot of products Consumer Reports dubbed "junk insurance." These were plans that barely qualified as insurance because they had very low caps on coverage or weren't even really insurance at all.[/font] Many were merely medical discount programs that didn't protect against health-related financial calamity. Insurance companies, including many of the biggest, marketed these products aggressively and often misleadingly—which was made easier by the lack of disclosure requirements in the sale of health insurance. Regulators struggled to protect consumers because so many of the junk plans were perfectly legal.
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[Warpy]

1. Excellent article

Junk insurance plans had features like a $30.00/day benefit for hospital insurance, laughably low. These were the only plans that would insure me and a lot of other people out there rejected by for profit insurance plans. A lot of people fell for the scam and "lost" their insurance under the ACA because it had only been a scam.

[Bill USA]

2. and people who have fallen for a scam are the last ones to admit they were scammed!! They are the

people con artists live off of!!

[Sarah Ibarruri]

3. Okay, so basically some insurance that people were buying was not even real insurance, but fraud?

omg. How can corporations get away with this shit?

They must be those "discount cards." I think they call themselves insurance, but only provide a discount when going to the doctor, going to get a lab test, and don't provide real care when you're really sick.

Can't these companies have their asses sued???

[JoeyT]

6. That or had unbelievably high deductables or low caps.

About seven or eight years ago I was shopping around for insurance and ran into a bunch like that...They didn't start paying until you'd hit the GDP of some smaller countries, and didn't pay very much before they hit the limit they were willing to pay, and from there on out it was GLMFYOYO.

They sucked in every other conceivable way, other than one: They were super cheap.

[Loudly]

4. Do articles like this help in November? Or does campaigning on Medicare for All?

[cui bono]

5. Campaigning on Obamacare and expanding it will help in November.

This article is too complex to reach the low info voters, though if you can soundbite it a little then it will help.

I'm all for single-payer but I don't see the point of campaigning on Medicare for all right now, Dems need to run on the success of Obamacare. If we run on Medicare for all it's almost like saying Obamacare isn't good.

We need to run on the success story, not on what we should have gotten. That sends the wrong message right now. Perhaps for 2016.

[JoeyT]

7. It actually soundbites pretty easily:

All those canceled insurance policies the right are up in arms over weren't so much insurance as outright scams. Obamacare made fake insurance that doesn't help you when you need it illegal.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. "Insurance In Name Only"

You're welcome.

[IronLionZion]

9. Yes

to both.

The ACA helps with badly needed regulations on the insurance industry, which will provide the funding necessary for increasing the supply of providers as well as the number of people who can access insurance and therefore care. The people benefitting from this will be the constituency to support moving forward towards single payer. Medicaid recipients especially will eventually demand some action towards increasing the number of providers who take medicaid, because of the low reimbursement rates presently. Private insurance recipients will also demand wider networks of available providers.

One step at a time. Try to change too much too quickly and we won't get anything.

Single payer will come from the state level, as it should.