No, Obama didn’t lie to you about your health care plan

christiefan915

christiefan915

Catalyst
More "Pants on Fire" falsehoods by Obamacare detracters.

Friday, Nov 15, 2013 08:00 AM EST

Terminated policies were introduced after ACA's passing -- often with insurers' knowledge they'd be scrapped

Dean Baker, AlterNet

President Obama has been getting a lot of grief in the last few weeks over his pledge that with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in place, people would be able to keep their insurance if they like it. The media have been filled with stories about people across the country who are having their insurance policies terminated, ostensibly because they did not meet the requirements of the ACA. While this has led many to say that Obama was lying, there is much less here than meets the eye.

First, it is important to note that the ACA grand-fathered all the individual policies that were in place at the time the law was enacted. This means that the plans in effect at the time that President Obama was pushing the bill could still be offered even if they did not meet all the standards laid out in the ACA.

The plans being terminated because they don’t meet the minimal standards were all plans that insurers introduced after the passage of the ACA. Insurers introduced these plans knowing that they would not meet the standards that would come into effect in 2014. Insurers may not have informed their clients at the time they sold these plans that they would not be available after 2014 because they had designed a plan that did not comply with the ACA.

However if the insurers didn’t tell their clients that the new plans would only be available for a short period of time, the blame would seem to rest with the insurance companies, not the ACA. After all, President Obama did not promise people that he would keep insurers from developing new plans that will not comply with the provisions of the ACA.

In addition to the new plans that were created that did not comply with the terms of the ACA, there have been complaints that the grandfathering was too strict. For example, insurers can only raise their premiums or deductibles by a small amount above the rate of medical inflation. As a result, many of the plans in existence at the time of the ACA are losing their grandfathered status.

In this case also it is wrong to view the insurers as passive actors who are being forced to stop offering plans because of the ACA. The price increases charged by insurers are not events outside of the control of insurers. If an insurer offers a plan which has many committed buyers, then presumably it would be able to structure its changes in ways that are consistent with the ACA. If it decides not to do so, this is presumably because the insurer has decided that it is not interested in continuing to offer the plan.

As a practical matter, there are many plans that insurers will opt to drop for market reasons that may or may not have anything to do with the ACA. It’s hard to see how this could be viewed as a violation of President Obama’s pledge. After all, insurers change and drop plans all the time. Did people who heard Obama’s pledge understand it to mean that insurers would no longer have this option once the ACA passed?

(Continued)

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/15/no_obama_didnt_lie_to_you_about_your_health_care_plan_partner/
 
Mostly irrelevant bullshit from our best Obama apoligist....

Grandfathered plans

Grandfathered plans are those that were in existence on March 23, 2010 and haven’t been changed in ways that substantially cut benefits or increase costs for consumers. Insurers must notify consumers with these policies that they have a grandfathered plan.

There are 2 types of grandfathered plans: job-based plans and individual plans (the kind you buy yourself, not through an employer).

Job-based grandfathered plans can enroll people after March 23, 2010 and still maintain their grandfathered status. They can do this as long as the plans haven’t been changed in ways that substantially cut benefits or increase costs for consumers, notify consumers with these policies that they have a grandfathered plan, and have continuously covered at least one person since March 23, 2010.
Individual grandfathered plans can’t newly enroll people after March 23, 2010 and have that new enrollment be considered a grandfathered policy. But insurance companies can continue to offer the grandfathered plans to people who were enrolled before that date. An insurance company can also decide to stop offering a grandfathered plan. If it does, it must provide notice 90 days before the plan ends and offer enrollees other available coverage options.

https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-i-have-a-grandfathered-health-plan/

The above stipulations are in effect and have not been changed.

Many people have been saying they've lost plans they've had for 5 years and better....
It makes little difference if they lose their plans Jan 1, 2014 or Dec. 31, 2014....the law says they will lose the coverage they had sooner or later...by law.
Blaming the ins. comp. for not informing their customers ?.....crap.
Obama didn't inform anyone of anything but say with certainty, "If you like your plan, you can keep it, PERIOD"...the only thing missing is the, "There is no doubt" part

A LIE IS A LIE IS A LIE....
 
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christiefan915 said:
More "Pants on Fire" falsehoods by Obamacare detracters.

Friday, Nov 15, 2013 08:00 AM EST

Terminated policies were introduced after ACA's passing -- often with insurers' knowledge they'd be scrapped

Dean Baker, AlterNet

President Obama has been getting a lot of grief in the last few weeks over his pledge that with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in place, people would be able to keep their insurance if they like it. The media have been filled with stories about people across the country who are having their insurance policies terminated, ostensibly because they did not meet the requirements of the ACA. While this has led many to say that Obama was lying, there is much less here than meets the eye.

First, it is important to note that the ACA grand-fathered all the individual policies that were in place at the time the law was enacted. This means that the plans in effect at the time that President Obama was pushing the bill could still be offered even if they did not meet all the standards laid out in the ACA.

The plans being terminated because they don’t meet the minimal standards were all plans that insurers introduced after the passage of the ACA. Insurers introduced these plans knowing that they would not meet the standards that would come into effect in 2014. Insurers may not have informed their clients at the time they sold these plans that they would not be available after 2014 because they had designed a plan that did not comply with the ACA.

However if the insurers didn’t tell their clients that the new plans would only be available for a short period of time, the blame would seem to rest with the insurance companies, not the ACA. After all, President Obama did not promise people that he would keep insurers from developing new plans that will not comply with the provisions of the ACA.

In addition to the new plans that were created that did not comply with the terms of the ACA, there have been complaints that the grandfathering was too strict. For example, insurers can only raise their premiums or deductibles by a small amount above the rate of medical inflation. As a result, many of the plans in existence at the time of the ACA are losing their grandfathered status.

In this case also it is wrong to view the insurers as passive actors who are being forced to stop offering plans because of the ACA. The price increases charged by insurers are not events outside of the control of insurers. If an insurer offers a plan which has many committed buyers, then presumably it would be able to structure its changes in ways that are consistent with the ACA. If it decides not to do so, this is presumably because the insurer has decided that it is not interested in continuing to offer the plan.

As a practical matter, there are many plans that insurers will opt to drop for market reasons that may or may not have anything to do with the ACA. It’s hard to see how this could be viewed as a violation of President Obama’s pledge. After all, insurers change and drop plans all the time. Did people who heard Obama’s pledge understand it to mean that insurers would no longer have this option once the ACA passed?

(Continued)

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/15/no_obama_didnt_lie_to_you_about_your_health_care_plan_partner/
Click to expand...

Can you explain this timeline and why Obama continued to repeat the same lie 34 times:

October 3, 2012 lie.Two years after Obama supposedly knew people would lose their insurance and doctor, while lying further about Obamacare for reelection:

And let me tell you exactly what ‘ObamaCare’ did. Number one, if you’ve got health insurance it doesn’t mean a government take over. You keep your own insurance. You keep your own doctor. But it does say insurance companies can’t jerk you around.​

October 28, 2013 lie. In complete contradiction to Obama’s remarks in 2009 and 2012, Jay Carney tries to explain what Obama said rather than what he really said:

What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide. So it's true that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don't meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.​

October 2013 lie. Sibelius comes along with another version of the story:

He could hardly have known that 15 million people would lose their health insurance and can hardly be held responsible.​
 
Poor Christie resorting to copying and pasting on behalf of the banned Howey. How pathetic being his little stooge.

I thought her recent flurry of starting threads was odd.

Now we know. She is on orders from Howey
 
Asa said:
Can you explain this timeline and why Obama continued to repeat the same lie 34 times:

October 3, 2012 lie.Two years after Obama supposedly knew people would lose their insurance and doctor, while lying further about Obamacare for reelection:
And let me tell you exactly what ‘ObamaCare’ did. Number one, if you’ve got health insurance it doesn’t mean a government take over. You keep your own insurance. You keep your own doctor. But it does say insurance companies can’t jerk you around.​

October 28, 2013 lie. In complete contradiction to Obama’s remarks in 2009 and 2012, Jay Carney tries to explain what Obama said rather than what he really said:
What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide. So it's true that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don't meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.​

October 2013 lie. Sibelius comes along with another version of the story:
He could hardly have known that 15 million people would lose their health insurance and can hardly be held responsible.​
Click to expand...

Cite where Obama "supposedly" knew people would lose their insurance and doctor. "Supposedly" looks like a weasel word to me.


The above comment has been Howey-approved ©
 
That's trying to rationalize the issue, he did lie to the American people. There was a report that was published on NBCNEWS which showed that Obama was full aware of the fact that people were going to lose their insurance as a result of his plan back in summer 2010. Instead, he kept on reinforcing that lie all throughout 2012.
 
You want me said:
So you contend that Obama was ignorant of the provisions of his signature law?
Click to expand...

I'm not contending anything. I asked asa to cite his contention that Obama "supposedly" knew and lied.

And please don't link me up with google, I want to see what asa has to say.



The above comment has been Howey-approved ©
 
arold10 said:
That's trying to rationalize the issue, he did lie to the American people. There was a report that was published on NBCNEWS which showed that Obama was full aware of the fact that people were going to lose their insurance as a result of his plan back in summer 2010. Instead, he kept on reinforcing that lie all throughout 2012.
Click to expand...

Okay, that's what I'm looking for, a cite. Howsabout it?
 
It was well known, as far back as 2009, that millions of Americans would lose their existing coverage under the Obamacare bill.


Obamacare’s disruption of the existing health insurance market—a disruption codified in law, and known to the administration—is only just beginning.


If you read the Affordable Care Act when it was passed, you knew that it was dishonest for President Obama to claim that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” as he did—and continues to do—on countless occasions.


We now know that the administration knew this all along.


It turns out that in an obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register, administration officials predicted massive disruption of the private insurance market.


The administration’s commentary in the Federal Register did not only refer to the individual market, but also the market for employer-sponsored health insurance.


Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains what’s called a “grandfather” provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them.


But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.


“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register.


All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and become illegal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.


Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance.


In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and become illegal, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market.


Plans purchased after March 23, 2010 do not benefit from the “grandfather” clause.


The real turnover rate would be higher, because plans can lose their grandfather status for a number of other reasons.


Obama’s famous promise that “you could keep your plan” was not some naïve error or accident.


He, and his allies, knew that previous Democratic attempts at health reform had failed because Americans were happy with the coverage they had, and opposed efforts to change the existing system.


Now, supporters of the law are offering a different argument. “We didn’t really mean it when we said you could keep your plan,” they say, “but it doesn’t matter, because the coverage you’re going to get under Obamacare will be better than the coverage you had before.”


But that’s not true. Obamacare forces insurers to offer services that most Americans don’t need, don’t want, and won’t use, for a higher price.



http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/31/obama-officials-in-2010-93-million-americans-will-be-unable-to-keep-their-health-plans-under-obamacare/
 
christiefan915 said:
Cite where Obama "supposedly" knew people would lose their insurance and doctor. "Supposedly" looks like a weasel word to me.


The above comment has been Howey-approved ©
Click to expand...

The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

“This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” said Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consultant who works for health industry firms. Laszewski estimates that 80 percent of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.

Obama didn't inform anyone of anything but say with certainty, "If you like your plan, you can keep it, PERIOD"not even one of his quotes makes it clear the caveats that would allow you to keep your plan or the fact that substandard plans were ILLEGAL.
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_...ns-could-not-keep-their-health-insurance?lite

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapot...e-to-keep-their-health-plans-under-obamacare/
 
christiefan915 said:
Cite where Obama "supposedly" knew people would lose their insurance and doctor. "Supposedly" looks like a weasel word to me.


The above comment has been Howey-approved ©
Click to expand...

You could start with the HHS re-writing the Obamacare regulations in July 2010 stripping out the grandfather clause.
 
Last night on Fox News' "Special Report" and CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper

," video aired of President Obama admitting that due to ObamaCare, "eight to nine million people … might have to change their coverage." The key words there are "have to."

The setting is the February of 2010 health care summit with Republicans. Minority Whip Eric Cantor is addressing the president directly on the issue of people losing their insurance due to the Affordable Care Act:

CANTOR: …Because I don't think you can answer the question in the positive to say that people will be able to maintain their coverage, people will be able to see the doctors they want, in the kind of bill that you are proposing:

OBAMA: Since you asked me a question, let me respond. The 8 to 9 million people you refer to that might have to change their coverage

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Govern...-millions-might-have-to-change-their-coverage
 
NOVA said:
Last night on Fox News' "Special Report" and CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper

," video aired of President Obama admitting that due to ObamaCare, "eight to nine million people … might have to change their coverage." The key words there are "have to."

The setting is the February of 2010 health care summit with Republicans. Minority Whip Eric Cantor is addressing the president directly on the issue of people losing their insurance due to the Affordable Care Act:

CANTOR: …Because I don't think you can answer the question in the positive to say that people will be able to maintain their coverage, people will be able to see the doctors they want, in the kind of bill that you are proposing:

OBAMA: Since you asked me a question, let me respond. The 8 to 9 million people you refer to that might have to change their coverage

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Govern...-millions-might-have-to-change-their-coverage
Click to expand...

C'mon bravs, get serious. The key word is "might", not "have to." If it was a fact he wouldn't have used the word "might." He would have said "Since you asked me a question, let me respond. The 8 t0 9 million people you refer to that have to change their coverage." No qualifiers.
 
Nevertheless, the simple fact of the matter is this: To any normal person, making the tacit assumption that words don't have any hidden meanings or exceptions, "If you like your plan, you can keep it" sounds like a pretty clear, right-to-the-point certainty on which one should be able to rely. When that sentence lands in the ear of a normal human being, it conveys the promise of continuity, and relief from any shocking news about losing one's coverage.

That promise has been broken, and now, the White House has to reel and offer some sputtering explanation as to how the promise is actually being kept, as long as you hear that sentence in a different way. Sure, yes, there were some news stories that served as the harbingers of today's bad news, but "If you like your plan, you can keep it" was uttered again and again, in spite of this.

I get why the administration wanted to utter this glib pronouncement. "If you like it, keep it." It's simple, to the point, easy to understand, and ready-made for our sound-bite age. In that way, the quip is very much unlike Obamacare, and much more like the plan that was never considered -- single payer. With Medicare for all, you pay taxes and the government covers your medical bills. That's it. No websites, no marketplaces, nothing fancy that's sure to break.

But hey, live by the glib pronouncement, die by the glib pronouncement.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/if-you-like-your-plan-you-can-keep-it-_n_4175715.html
 
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christiefan915 said:
C'mon bravs, get serious. The key word is "might", not "have to." If it was a fact he wouldn't have used the word "might." He would have said "Since you asked me a question, let me respond. The 8 t0 9 million people you refer to that have to change their coverage." No qualifiers.
Click to expand...


No...I'm afraid the pertinent phrase is HAVE TO.....as in, you might be forced....you might not have any choice

Well that might proved true....you do have to, you will be forced, you don't have any choice.
 
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