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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says he’ll do everything he can to help people coping with health insurance cancellations, but legally and practically his options appear limited. (Since when has President Obama let the law get in the way of his objectives? Remember he said he wasn't going to enforce DOMA? And he waived the employer mandate in Obamacare? And what about all the executive orders? This man is rarely constrained by law, and is never held to account.)
That means the latest political problem engulfing Obama’s health care overhaul may not be resolved quickly, cleanly or completely. (I note here that the concern of the AP appears to be the impact on Obama.)
White House deputy spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that the president has asked his team to look at administrative fixes (Wait, I thought his options were limited?) to help people whose plans are being canceled as a result of new federal coverage rules. Obama, in an NBC interview Thursday, said“I am sorry” to people who are losing coverage and had relied on his assurances (Assurances? It's clever little language choices like this that twist the facts. He did not make assurances. He made definitive, unequivocal statements.) that if they liked their plan, they could keep it.
The focus appears to be on easing the impact for a specific group: people whose policies have been canceled and who don’t qualify for tax credits to offset higher premiums. The administration has not settled on a particular fix and it’s possible the final decision would apply to a broader group.
Still, a president can’t just pick up the phone and order the Treasury to cut checks for people suffering from insurance premium sticker shock. (Why not? What would stop him?) Spending would have to be authorized by law. (Because the Constitution says that all spending bills must arise from the House.) Another obstacle: Most of the discontinued policies appear to have been issued after the law was enacted, according to insurers and independent experts. Legally, that means they would have never been eligible for cancellation protections offered by the statute. Its grandfather clause applies only to policies that were in effect when the law passed in 2010. (Actually, the grandfather clause applies only to policies in force and unchanged in any way. As soon as someone increases a deductible, or adds or subtracts a rider, the policy is no longer grandfathered. So this means that if you bought a policy after the law was passed, you're affected by obamacare but you have no remedy. This is a entirely predictable eventuality, but doesn't qualify as an excuse. Obamacare created the problem, regardless of whether or not there is a legal remedy.)
More than five weeks after open-enrollment season started for uninsured Americans, Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement is still struggling. Persistent website problems appear to have kept most interested customers from signing up. (This is putting a happy face on it. We don't know how many "interested customers" there are, so this can only be deemed as speculation. Simply visiting the website does not qualify as "interested." Many people are trying to ascertain what obamacare with force them to do.
Oh, and by the way. These people are not customers. I make the distinction because customers are in voluntary relationships. They choose whether or not they will make the purchase. With obamacare, people are coerced to purchase.) Repairs are under way. Friday the administration said the website’s income verification component will be offline for maintenance until Tuesday morning. An enrollment report expected next week is likely to reflect only paltry sign-ups. (Pretty strong language from an ordinarily sympathetic AP. "Paltry" is a very appropriate choice of words.)
Website woes have been eclipsed by the uproar over cancellation notices sent to millions of people who have individual plans that don’t measure up to the benefits package and level of financial protection required by the law. (This an artful choice of words. "Level of financial protection" means that there was a long list of mandates that insurers would have to add to their policies to qualify. This essentially removed from the marketplace any policy that didn't measure up, and that is why people are losing their coverage. They can no longer choose to purchase a catastrophic policy with a high deductible. They must purchase a whole host of coverages, whether they want them or not.)
“It was clear from the beginning that there were going to be some winners and losers,” said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, who supports the health overhaul. “But the losers are calling reporters, and the winners can’t get on the website.” (It may have been clear to professor Jost, but the truth about obamacare was carefully edited out of the major news media. And the President himself had made his now-infamous multiple statements about people being able to keep their coverage. There was never any indication that there was a possibility of losers from anywhere in the administration or the media, until the problems became too big to cover up. Now people like professor Jost are CYAing post facto.)
In the House, a Republican sponsored bill that would give insurers another year to sell individual policies that were in effect Jan. 1, 2013, is expected to get a floor vote late next week. In the Senate, Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu has introduced legislation that would require insurers to keep offering current individual plans. Democrats, who as a group have stood firmly behind the new law so far, may start to splinter if the uproar continues. (Uproar the media would like to bury.)
The legislation faces long odds to begin with, but it may not do the job even if it passes. The reason: States, not the federal government, regulate the individual insurance market. State insurance commissioners have already approved the plans that will be offered for next year. It may be too late to wind back to where things stood at the beginning of this year.
“It has taken the industry many months to rejigger their systems to comply with the law,” said Bob Laszewski, a health care industry consultant. “The cancellation letters have already gone out. What are these guys supposed to do, go down to the post office and buy a million stamps?”
The insurance industry doesn’t like the legislative route either. “We have some significant concerns with how that would work operationally,” said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. (This is what you get when government meddles in the economy. The ripple effects reverberate throughout the marketplace. Government refuses to consider these effects, thinking that simply passing a law will change only the aspect being legislated. That never happens. Government legislates as if the economy were static. It is not.)
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