More than six million Americans had their healthcare plans cancelled last year because they were not ObamaCare compliant. The bloodshed has slowed but a new round of recent cancellations is leaving Americans scrambling to find new ObamaCare plans and the options now available to them are far more expensive with greater limitations.
It’s the same old story. ObamaCare continues to deliver pain to Americans’ wallets as insurers deliver the bad news to customers that their plans are cancelled because they must purge their portfolios of non-ObamaCare compliant plans. We thought the pain was last year, but as a story from CNBC reports, insurers like Aetna began their cancellations last year and are continuing them into 2015.
Most of the current cancellations are for plans that should’ve been canceled last year when ObamaCare first came into effect, but the President unilaterally changed the law extending the life of non-compliant policies for another year following the disastrous rollout of his signature law. That extension is up and Americans are once again receiving cancellations. Some of the hardest hit states: 250,000 in Virginia, 30,000 in New Mexico; 14,000 in Kentucky; and Colorado, Alaska, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Maine are expecting thousands of cancellations.
The challenge for those whose plans were cancelled this year was the host turn-around time to secure a new plan and of course the plans that are available. Many customers are finding that they will be paying substantially more for similar plans that were cancelled and in some cases more for less coverage and more restrictive networks.
CNBC reports on one New Yorker’s experience:
New York City resident Nicolas Karlson was happy to be one of at least 2.5 million people who beat a major Obamacare enrollment deadline last week, but he's going to be paying a lot more for health insurance next year because of it.
To cover himself, his wife, Monica, and their three children, 45-year-old Karlson will go from paying $1,805 every three months for their long-standing Aetna plan, to a new one from New York State's Obamacare exchange that will cost them $1,221.60 per month, or more than 100 percent more than his old plan cost.
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Several months ago, Aetna sent the Karlsons a letter "saying that our current plan is being canceled, and to go to the website and review plans that are available," Nicolas Karlson said.
Despite that, the alternative were not posted for more than a month.
And when Karlson looked at them, he was surprised.
To get comparable coverage, he was looking at plans that cost between around $20,300 and $23,612 annually.
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The Affordable Care Act mandated a set of "essential health benefits" that all insurance plans had to cover, which included preventative services, ER visits, pediatric vision and dental care and mental health care. That mandate rendered many plans non-compliant with the law.
Pre-existing plans, or grandfathered plans, were allowed to continue under the ACA, but only if insurers made no significant changes to coverage. And in response to the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov last year, the Obama administration has allowed the option of other non-compliant plans continuing through 2017.
But not all states or insurers have taken up that option, or maintained it for their customers.
The Karlson Family is one of hundreds of thousands who face the challenge of finding a new plan before the deadlines expire. Today is the deadline for residents of Massachusetts, Washington, and Rhode Island to sign up for the exchanges otherwise customers won’t have coverage beginning January 1. Exchanges in three other states (Vermont, Minnesota and Hawaii) have given residents until December 31.
The President and ObamaCare supporters try to demonstrate the help that ObamaCare has provided, but they can’t cover up or deny the pain that has been inflicted. By interfering in the private healthcare market, the government has triggered what economists call market distortions. In reality, there are too many people whose care is gone and may never be the same. Cancer patients, for example, now face greater hurdles in finding care givers for their treatment. And then there are a host of other unintended consequences in the labor market as employers are now forced to provide healthcare or face penalties.
It’s no wonder ObamaCare remains unpopular – it’s a bad deal for Americans.