A disturbing investigative report out of NBC News sheds light on the Obama administration's advance knowledge that its healthcare law would force millions of individuals to lose their private insurance, despite repeated promises from the President himself that "if you like your plan, you can keep it."
"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.”
As the problems of the Affordable Care Act continue to climb, Americans are realizing that the dream of universal healthcare is simply that—a dream; and that its government orchestrated a purposeful cover-up of just how consequential such a bill would be to the American people; a healthcare law that overpromised what it could deliver, meddles with individual liberty and free markets, obliterates the logic of insurance itself, and perhaps most importantly, puts the squeeze on an already strapped middle class.
Those concerned with the effects of the Affordable Care Act should bring their concerns to the 2014 and 2016 elections.