Daily Archives: 26 November 2013

Obamacare: Year Two

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President Barack Obama, through his HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, has decided to delay the open enrollment period for the second year of his Obamacare by a month.  Obama has said, through his Press Secretary Jay Carney, that the delay will give insurance companies more time to evaluate the results of this year’s enrollments and so to adjust their premiums for that second year.

A carefully anonymous “HHS spokesman” also claims

This change is good news for consumers, who will have more time to learn about plans before enrolling and an open enrollment period that’s a week longer[.]

Both of these claims, of course, are nonsense.  Manhattan Institute Fellow Yevgeniy Feyman pointed out Friday

You are delaying open enrollment [in 2014] for one month.  Premiums are submitted in April, so whether you have open enrollment on Oct 1 or Nov 1, those premiums are already set in stone.  People will just be enrolling a month later.

What else is happening then?  Let’s see….  Oh, yeah—mid-term elections, which has become a referendum on Obamacare as the program has its effects on Americans.  The delay puts enrollment, which would have begun in mid-October, some three weeks prior to the mid-terms, into mid-November—after those elections.

With the premiums already determined—some months prior—Obama’s plain hope here is that the American voter will remain ignorant of the costs of the policies they’re stuck with buying or stuck with renewing and that they will have forgotten the costs already inflicted over the current year from the  cancelations of policies that Americans wanted and the policies’ replacement with poorer policies that have higher premiums, higher deductibles, and “coverage” for things that aren’t wanted or needed.

This is Progressives’ politics at their ugliest.  Yes, even worse than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D, NV) pernicious destruction of the Senate filibuster.

America’s Health Insurance Plans

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AHIP is “the national trade association representing the health insurance industry” according to their Web site.  As a leader in the health insurance industry I thought they might be able to shed some light on the widely posited difficulties of implementing President Barack Obama’s latest Obamacare “fix” of “encouraging” health insurance companies to stop canceling non-Obamacare compliant policies, as the law requires, and reinstate already canceled policies.  Accordingly, last week I sent an email to AHIP asking a couple of simple questions:

Gentlemen:
I’m a conservative blogger at APlebesSite.com; you can poke around the blog and see that while I’m unabashedly conservative, I try to write from facts and logic rather than simply from polemics.
To that end, I’d like to write an article on the logistics of reviving cancelled health insurance policies, and so I’d like to ask you some questions (and probably engage in some back and forth as new questions arise, so as to be sure I write accurately).
My questions center on two premises: first, the relevant state commissions already have approved the plans you wish to revive, and so they should not be a problem.  Obviously, they’re not always going to be cooperative (vis., Washington), and you have no control over that.  For this purpose, I’d like to assume the commissions are not a problem.  I’ll make clear in my article that I’m eliding state insurance commission matters.
The second premise is that you already have these policies built and archived–at the least you’d need copies of what you sold in case of later litigation, so that you’d not have to rely on plaintiffs’ versions.  Thus, there would seem to be no problem recreating the policies for further sale or for reinstatement with those customers who received cancellation notices.
Despite this, there has been a lot of publicity about how hard it is, logistically, to revive and resell these cancelled policies.  With all the publicity, though, there has been no commentary on the whys of that difficulty, only a long series of unsubstantiated claims.  I’d like to understand the logistic difficulty, so that I can write accurately.
Thus, as a start, please walk me through the process of recreating a typical health insurance policy that was cancelled and then offering it to customers, on the assumption that the states’ insurance commissions do not represent roadblocks.  As I said, I’ll likely have followup questions as I begin to understand the problems involved.  I don’t want to post my article until I have a fuller understanding than I do now.
Thank you for your time and patience.

It’s been more than a week, and apparently AHIP has chosen not to respond.  Which raises another question: why would a health insurance trade association not want to explain the difficulties in reviving and reselling already built and approved (with that status existing as recently as just a few weeks ago) health insurance policies?  Why would they not want to substantiate these claims?