In an attempt to mitigate the fallout from a series of high profile insurance policy cancellations, President Obama announced an administrative fix to the Affordable Care Act that will allow Americans with individual health insurance policies to keep their plans if they like them. The fix will involve re-configuring the “grandfathering” rule in the ACA that allowed substandard, existing policies to remain in place beyond January 1, 2014 even though the plans don’t comply with new ACA consumer protections and minimum standards for coverage.
Put another way, if you like your plan, your health insurance provider can’t cancel it because of the Affordable Care Act. Insurance customers who bought plans before March, 2010 won’t face cancellations because of regulations in the law — regulations designed to end abusive insurance practices. Additionally, the president announced that customers whose policies changed after March, 2010, won’t see their policies canceled because of the ACA. Plus, any policies purchased after March, 2010 can’t be canceled because of the ACA. In effect, the grandfather clause in the law has returned to where it was when the law was passed, and, according to the president, extended.
Of course, in the meantime, insurance providers can cancel plans for a variety of other reasons, oftentimes as soon as a policyholder is sick or injured. Providers can likewise continue to jack up premiums, deductibles and co-pays. Basically, all of the same nefarious activities that occurred prior to the passage of the ACA. Likewise, insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare, which canceled all individual policies because it’s abandoning the individual marketplace, can continue to cancel those policies because the cancellations had nothing to do with ACA rules and regulations. So, no free preventative or maternity care. No caps on out of pocket expenses. No end to annual and lifetime limits. Nothing, plus all the craptastical things from the pre-ACA system.
Yes, if you keep your old, pre-ACA policy, you can be utterly screwed and bankrupted by your insurer as if the ACA never happened. The only difference is that your insurer can’t scapegoat the ACA any more… [CONTINUE READING]