That’s the headline for the print version of this story from Bloomberg Businessweek, which tries its best to put a positive spin on the president’s deception.
Millions of Americans were surprised to learn this month that their insurance companies won’t renew their expiring private health plans next year, despite President Obama’s frequent assurances that people who liked their coverage could keep it. What’s mostly been lost in the well-documented outrage over the cancellations is that they’re a feature, not a bug, of the Affordable Care Act. Some policies are being canceled because the law is doing precisely what it was meant to do: create an insurance market where Americans share the cost of getting sick more broadly.
In Obamacare’s central bargain, insurance companies agreed to stop turning people away or charging them more for being sick, in exchange for everyone buying a minimum level of coverage. “Yes, some people will have to pay more, but they were paying an artificially low amount,” says Sabrina Corlette, a researcher at the Georgetown Health Policy Research Institute. “They were benefiting from a system that discriminated against people with preexisting conditions.”
To dismantle that system, the law sets new rules for health plans sold after 2013, limiting how much insurers can vary premiums by age, gender, or health status. The new plans must pay for at least 60 percent of members’ medical costs on average. They also have to provide 10 areas of coverage, called essential health benefits, such as hospitalization, mental health treatment, and maternity care. In the past, people buying health plans on their own, rather than through an employer, could lower their premiums by purchasing more limited policies. Now that all policies must provide comprehensive coverage, people who’d bought limited plans on the cheap are seeing their premiums go up.
Note the Georgetown professor’s dismay that people choosing their own level of health insurance coverage somehow benefited from unfair discrimination. Unbelievable.
