Ashley Parker, Michael Shear, Robert Pear | November 14, 2013
President Obama bowed to mounting political pressure from across the country and on Capitol Hill on Thursday, announcing new rules that will let insurance companies keep people on health care plans that would not have been allowed under the Affordable Care Act.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr. Obama said the changes should allow most people to retain their health care plans for a year despite having received letters saying they could no longer keep their insurance.
“Insurers can extend current plans that would otherwise be canceled into 2014,” Mr. Obama said. “This fix won’t solve every problem for every person, but it is going to help of lot of people.”
He also acknowledged that “we fumbled the rollout on this health care law,” but expressed confidence that “by the time we look back on this next year, that people are going to say, this is working well, and it’s helping a lot of people.”
The president’s plan would apply only to people who have had their existing policies canceled. Those currently without insurance would not be able to buy the old plans.
State insurance commissioners would have the right to override the administrative changes.
Despite the president’s reversal, Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that he intended to push ahead with a House vote Friday on a measure that would allow consumers to keep their canceled plans without penalty and allow others to sign up for them. Mr. Boehner said he was skeptical of the president’s proposal and that the new law needed to be overturned.
“The only way to fully protect the American people is to scrap this law once and for all,” Mr. Boehner told reporters.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, said her members were clamoring for a fix on top of what the president was offering. Many of them, she said, were those who fought hard for the law’s passage and want to see it saved.
“Nobody is as unhappy as I am,” she said, adding, “Maybe the president of the United States.”
“But the fact is we’re all of the same mind in our caucus,” she added. “We have to have a fix.”
The White House’s turnabout comes as a growing number of congressional Democrats are expressing frustration with the president for the botched rollout of the health care law, including a poorly functioning website and the false promise he made that consumers who liked their existing health plans would be able to keep them.
On Friday, the Republican-controlled House is set to vote on a bill by Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, that would allow Americans to keep their existing health coverage through 2014 without penalties. That left the White House needing to act to avoid having large numbers of Democrats vote for the Republican legislation.
A similar proposal, led by Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, and backed by roughly half a dozen other Democrats, is also underway in the Senate. Ms. Landrieu’s proposal would allow people to keep their current insurance permanently but, she said, is designed to encourage people to eventually switch to better insurance on the federal exchanges.
On Thursday afternoon, Democratic senators were to hold a special caucus meeting to discuss the health care law, and were to be briefed by Denis R. McDonough, the president’s chief of staff; Chris Jennings, a senior health policy adviser; and Mike Hash, director of the Health and Human Services Department’s office of health care reform.
Some details of the plan still must be worked out.
A White House official confirmed that “we don’t have a commitment from state insurance commissioners” to go along with the president’s new policy. State insurance regulators also said they had not discussed it with the administration.
Under its new policy, the White House is declaring that the Affordable Care Act does not require insurers to upgrade existing coverage for people who are now enrolled. Consumers could thus renew existing insurance policies even if they did not provide all the benefits and protections required by the 2010 health care law.
State insurance regulators said they were pleased that the administration was not allowing sales of old noncompliant policies to new customers.
It is not clear what prices will be charged by insurers for existing policies that are continued in force through 2014. Insurers generally do not have rates approved for the renewal of such coverage in 2014 because the policies were supposed to be terminated at the end of this year.
A White House official, asked if insurers could increase rates on these policies, said the question should be directed to insurers and insurance commissioners. “As a pragmatic matter,” the official said, “it will be up to insurance commissioners and states.”
If insurers want to increase rates on existing policies, they would, in most states, have to file the changes with state insurance commissioners, who could review the rates and take action under state law to determine if the rate increases were reasonable.
Obama administration officials did not say whether insurers could selectively renew policies for some consumers in some markets, but not others. For business reasons, insurers might want to drop some customers or withdraw from some markets.
Insurers have opposed legislation that would allow or require them to continue individual insurance policies that have been canceled because they do not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
Insurers fear that healthier policyholders would be more likely to take this option, leaving the new insurance exchanges with less healthy people who are more expensive to insure.
For Mr. Obama, the plan is a crucial step toward fixing a mounting political problem: the loss of trust among the public and even his most loyal supporters in Congress.
With several polls showing that a majority of the public does not believe that the president is honest and trustworthy, the White House apparently decided to confront criticism that Mr. Obama had not been truthful about the heath care law.
The White House had hoped that expressions of regret by Mr. Obama in an interview last week would have addressed the public anger about those who were being forced off their health care plans because of the law.
But in the days since the interview, the criticism has continued to build, especially on Capitol Hill, where Democrats have become increasingly angry about the pressure they are receiving from angry constituents.
Source: NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/us/politics/obama-to-offer-health-care-fix-to-keep-plans-democrat-says.html?hp&_r=2&