Obama's Phony Cancellation Solution

 

IBDEditorials.com

Fraud: President Obama's attempt to fix the insurance cancellation problem that his own law created isn't meant to help anyone. It's an attempt to shift blame for the mess onto the backs of insurance companies. Some fix.

Even a cursory glance at Obama's "plan" shows that it won't solve anything. Obama says state insurance commissioners could, if they want, let insurance companies extend existing individual plans another year. But they don't have to.

Obama would also leave it up to the insurance companies whether they'd extend these policies, while requiring them to send letters to millions who've already gotten cancellation notices explaining why their current plans suck — thereby loading still more costs onto the backs of insurance companies.

Let's put aside for the moment the question of whether Obama can even do this legally.

This is a president who, after all, has already arbitrarily changed and postponed various parts of ObamaCare — such as the congressional opt-out, the employer mandate, various enforcement rules, cuts to Medicare Advantage, out-of-pocket caps — when they would have proved politically hazardous.

The question is: Why should anyone trust Obama's latest "you can keep your plan" promise?

It turns out, no one should.

Even if Obama's proposal were legal — and he hasn't even convinced liberal stalwarts like Howard Dean, who wonders whether Obama "has the legal authority to do this, since this was a congressional bill that set this up" — it is logistically impossible. And Obama knows it.

Regulators and insurers somehow are supposed to make these decisions, come up with any appropriate rules, draft these new mandatory notices, re-contact millions of consumers, reprogram computers — things that normally take months to complete — all within the next four weeks.

Plus, Obama's plan would do nothing to help small businesses that also are being hit with cancellation notices, or the many who are losing jobs or seeing their hours cut because of ObamaCare.

What Obama's plan is designed to do, instead, is make insurance companies look like the bad guys if they don't extend those individual policies, while trying to diffuse Democratic support for legislative changes to the law.

As one industry expert told Buzzfeed: "This doesn't change anything other than force insurers to be the political flak jackets for the administration. So now, when we don't offer these policies, the White House can say it's the insurers doing this and not being flexible."

There's a bigger issue at stake here. Tinkering with ObamaCare through desperate last-minute administrative changes won't fix anything. In fact, Obama's "fix" will only make this terrible law even worse.

As Karen Ignagni, who heads the insurance industry trade union, explained, "changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers."

The bottom line is that the only way to fix the myriad problems being caused by ObamaCare is to repeal all of ObamaCare and start over.