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Sunday, November 17, 2013

Why Reinstate The Canceled Plans?

So King Obama waved his royal scepter the other day and decreed that if you liked your plan you may keep it again and anyway it was never his fault that you lost it in the first place. Now the insurance companies can opt to untie the Gordian knot of risk calculations and regulatory hurdles and reinstate the plans.

Why would they?

Dig this.
The health-insurance companies...would be deluged with lawsuits by insureds who claimed that the policies were illegal and wrongly denied coverage for this or that treatment. The insurance companies themselves would get into the act, filing suits to be compensated for payouts they’d made based on the illegal policies. The Obama “waiver” would avail them of nothing in a court, where a judge would be obliged to follow the law, not Dear Leader’s enforcement preferences.
...
Obama has no constitutional leg to stand on in violating — and, by his waivers, encouraging violations of — the Obamacare law. The insurance companies have no hope of immunity.
Anyone want to bet that the Administration would send briefs in support of the insurance companies to any and all court cases covering consumer lawsuits based on blatantly illegal health care plans? Perhaps it's more likely that the progressives infesting the White House, who hate Big Insurance like it's a tool of the Devil, would relish the chance to finish off those for-profit schweinhund once and for all and would actually encourage lawsuits behind the scenes.

If she wants to hook up with that super cute, vegan guy from the Queer Film Studies class, she can sue her insurer for not providing the necessary unguents, antibiotic poultices and latex doohickeys as required by law.
And then there's this.
“It’s a whirlwind, my friend,” says David Oscar, communications chair of the New Jersey Association of Health Underwriters. “I’ve been dealing with Jan. 1 renewals since the beginning of November. Now I’ve got to go back? For me as a broker, as a person who represents insurance carriers, I have egg on my face, because now I have everybody sending me an e-mail saying, ‘Hey, Dave, I heard on the “Today” show this morning that I can keep my old plan.’ ”
How do you explain to your old customers that they can have their old policies back, but at much higher prices without looking like a predator? The prices will have to go up as the renewed policies will take the place of the overpriced, healthy person policies mandated by the ACA so the insurers can remain solvent. It would be far easier to simply point to the ACA legislation and all of the state-specific regulatory hurdles and wistfully say that as much as you'd like to, there's no way to bring the dead policies back to life.

Meanwhile, you cut off all funding to Democratic candidates and pour money like water into Republican coffers to get this toad of a law utterly repealed. It's either that or bankruptcy and then single payer.

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