Obamacare is forcing people off their current plans, and making them pay for plans with benefits they don’t need. Single men with no children on the way will be forced to pay for maternity care. How can that make health care more affordable? The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner explains the whole ugly mess here.
As of this week roughly 4.8 million individual insurance plans have been cancelled because they didn’t meet ObamaCare’s exacting standards, such as providing as maternity care (even if you were a man), alcohol rehabilitation or contraceptives. Another 5 million are expected to lose their coverage.
Few ObamaCare supporters truly mourned these cancellations. After all, they believed that those plans were, in the president’s words “subpar.” The people who bought these plans just didn’t know what was good for them.
The people, however, disagreed.
In response to the public outcry, Obama offered a temporary “fix.” People with noncompliant plans will be able top keep their policies for one more year, but only if insurance companies choose to do so, and state insurance commissioners go along. And while insurers could renew existing plans, even if they don’t meet ObamaCare requirements, they still cannot sell those policies to anyone new.
The problem is that insurance plans are not simply a list of benefits on a piece of paper. They are a complex interrelationship of benefits, the pool of insured customers, a network of providers, and so on. And, because for three years insurers have been told that they could not sell noncompliant plans, many of those plans simply don’t exist anymore.
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