Obama to Say Insured Can Keep Health Plans for a Year

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By JEFF ZELENY and MARY BRUCE - ABC News


http://i.imgur.com/geNp6Hs.jpg

President Obama is poised to announce today that Americans can keep their health insurance plans -- for up to a year -- before they are required to get coverage that meets the stiffer requirements of the Affordable Care Act, ABC News has learned.

The president will try to ease the concerns of people whose health care plans were canceled, two senior Democratic congressional officials who were briefed by the White House said today.

They will be allowed to keep their plans until the end of 2014, the officials told ABC News.

The president's announcement is in response to rising outrage from Democrats on Capitol Hill.

It comes a day after the White House announced that only 26,794 people, a far smaller number than expected, successfully chose a health insurance plan using the glitch-plagued Healthcare.gov website in its first month.

In total, 106,185 people signed up for health insurance in October, and most of those individuals -- 79,391 -- used the 15 state-run websites, not the troubled federal site, the White House said Wednesday.

Meanwhile, lawmakers from both parties are gathering support for legislation that would make good on the president's promise that people who wanted to keep their plans could do so.

In selling the Affordable Care Act to the U.S. public, the president often used the same refrain: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

With millions of consumers receiving cancellation notices, however, the president has come under fire for his misleading comments.

Americans who purchase insurance on their own, a small portion of the population, might be forced to switch plans because their providers have made changes that don't meet the stiffer standards established under the Affordable Care Act.

Obama apologized last week to Americans who are losing the health care coverage he said they could keep.

"I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," he told NBC News.

[PorkChopSandwiches]

Slowly crumbling before it starts

[FBD]

and this is after the "you get a waiver until 2014"

:-k so now is it just going to be waivers every year and then hillary promising to do something about it while TPTB arrange to coronate her? (with sensible ideas getting shot down all over the place since they arent welfare compatible)


and btw, this is in no way shape or form equal to that disgusting tea party notion that obamacare be delayed one year :lol:


....


These idiots don't understand that it is already too late.

These are running businesses, they have already set their plans and policies for 2014. The Democrates can not just "decree" that insurance companies should do something different at the last minute.

The old health care plans have already expired, and are in the process of being canceled. This won't stop that.

[FBD]

"the only thing that you should EVER need to pass in order to find out what's in it is a STOOL SAMPLE"

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Obama: You can now keep your plans for an additional year, even if they don't meet the Obamacare standards. Not really though, because those damned insurance companies canceled all those policies, so blame them for everything!

[Muddy]

You leave my little chocolate baby alone..

[PorkChopSandwiches]

little :roll:

[FBD]

baby ruth


or baby new year, take your pick

[FBD]

By Timothy Sandefur of Pacific Legal (http://blog.pacificlegal.org/2013/lawlessness-what-this-mornings-obamacare-announcement-means/)

Lawlessness: what this morning’s Obamacare announcement means

President Obama this morning announced that he would be issuing an administrative order—which requires no Congressional review—delaying the implementation of provisions of Obamacare that had led to the cancellation of a million or so insurance policies. This follows on the Administration’s similar delays of the Employer Mandate and the Individual Mandate. According to CNN, this morning’s delay is supposed to “cover millions of people who have had their insurance policies cancelled,” but the fact is that in many states, it won’t even do that—because insurance companies, anticipating the implementation of the new law, long ago decided to cancel these policies. Surprise!—except for the attentive observers who have been warning about this for years. Moreover, many states—including California—which are already going along with Obamacare are already beyond the Administration’s reach, because those insurance policies were cancelled by state agencies. This morning’s delay can’t do anything about that.

But there’s a much deeper problem at work here: the lawlessness of Obamacare, root and branch. The problems began with its initial enactment—first the Individual Mandate was supposed to be a “regulation of commerce.” That was unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court finally said no…only to rewrite the law by declaring it to be a “tax” instead. That doesn’t work either, though, because the Constitution requires that tax laws originate in the House of Representatives, and Obamacare began in the Senate. Meanwhile, the contents of the law—which members of Congress didn’t bother to read before they passed—gave away tremendous new powers to administrative agencies to write new rules to fill in crucial blank spots in the statute itself. For example, the Individual Mandate forces Americans to buy “minimum essential coverage”—but that term was left up to unelected bureaucrats in the Department of Health & Human Services to define later. And the law created a powerful new independent agency, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, and gave it power to write law about Medicare reimbursement rates without any checks and balances…and tried to make the law itself unrepealable.

Now come unilateral administrative delays on the order of the President. Keep in mind what these delays really are—they are not new laws, or amendments to the law…they are orders from the President to his subordinates to simply not enforce laws that are on the books. The Employer Mandate, for example, was “delayed” by an order that simply instructs Executive agencies not to enforce the reporting requirement. A company that fails to comply with that Mandate is still violating the law—it’s just that the President has chosen to look the other way for now.

The Constitution of the United States says that the President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That provision was written because the Founding Fathers had experienced the arbitrariness of a government in which the British monarchy picked and chose which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore. The result of such political control over the law was, they knew, a breakdown in the rule of law—and a breakdown that allowed the powerful and politically well-connected to manipulate the system at will. As James Madison warned in the Federalist, “mutable” laws


poison[] the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Unfortunately, today’s administrative state gives so much power to unelected bureaucrats—who are protected against any meaningful control by voters—that they can alter, manipulate, and change the law almost at will. The result is a breakdown in the rule of law and an arbitrary system in which the government operates, not according to predictable standards and meaningful rules, but according to political whim and in arbitrary, day-to-day, ad hoc manner.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Today's whole speech was a classic misdirection....because of Obamacare, insurers were required to cancel certain policies. Now, after the fact, Obama says that you can keep your policy (for an extra year only), so now it becomes the problem of the insurance companies as to whether they even want to reinstate those policies since they rewrote everything to comply with Obamacare. So, when an insurer decides against reinstating a canceled policy, Obama will say it's not his fault, the insurance company is the one that canceled the policy...even though it got canceled because of Obama/Obamacare.

This guy bobs and weaves better than Ali ever did in his prime.

[FBD]

yeah, maybe if Ali were fighting retards with socks on their hands

[Teh One Who Knocks]

I don't even think that what the President did today is legal....Obamacare is law which outlines what a health insurance plan needs to have in it. He can't just 'decree by proclamation' that plans that would be illegal under Obamacare are now legal once again. Last time I looked, only congress can make changes to law.

[Muddy]

I don't even think that what the President did today is legal....Obamacare is law which outlines what a health insurance plan needs to have in it. He can't just 'decree by proclamation' that plans that would be illegal under Obamacare are now legal once again. Last time I looked, only congress can make changes to law.

I kinda thought the same thing... Who is this emperor?

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Eric Pfeiffer - Yahoo! News


At best, President Obama's proposed healthcare “fix” offers political protection for vulnerable lawmakers. That's because beyond giving insurance companies permission to continue offering individual healthcare plans that don't comply with the Affordable Care Act, the president's fix doesn't compel anyone to do anything.

So why even propose such a fix, and especially a remedy that, according insurance experts, could lead to more expensive premiums for the people the fix is supposed to help?

As Kaiser Family Foundation vice president Larry Levitt explained to Yahoo News the best "fix" supporters of the Affordable Care Act could offer is to simply let the current process play out.

"From the perspective of keeping the market stable, and premiums down, a quicker transition to new coverage is the best approach," Levitt said. "Any plan that allows individuals to keep their old policies will tend to raise costs and raise premiums.”

In other words, Obama's proposed fix offers little in the way of actual help to consumers or even insurance providers.

What it does do is provide Obama (and by extension the Democrats in Congress) a scapegoat and a much-needed short-term political gain.

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

The president's proposal creates a number of challenges. For example, insurers are not actually required to restore cancelled plans. And if consumers keep their less expensive plans, it will almost certainly drive up costs for those who are buying plans from the healthcare exchanges.

"If due to these changes fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase coverage in the exchange, premiums will increase in the marketplace and there will be fewer choices for consumers," Karen Ignagni, chief executive of America's Health Insurance Plans, a leading organization of insurance providers, said in a statement.

Levitt adds that it will be "complex but not impossible" for insurers to reverse course on cancelled plans. But while that course is theoretically possible, the insurers have little incentive to reverse course and "throw a wrench in the works in the bottom half of the 9th inning," as Levitt described it.

"It is unclear how, as a practical matter, the changes proposed today by the President can be put into effect," said Jim Donelon, president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and Louisiana Insurance commissioner. "In many states, cancellation notices have already gone out to policyholders and rates and plans have already been approved for 2014. Changing the rules through administrative action at this late date creates uncertainty and may not address the underlying issues."

Regardless of whether the president's fix does anything to actually help consumers, you can almost certainly expect more political fixes to be offered before the January 2014 deadline for all Americans to be insured goes into effect.

Republicans in the House are gearing up to consider Fred Upton's (R-MI) bill that would allow insurers to continue to offer non-ACA compliant plans on a yearly basis, while a potential Democratic bill in the Senate would require insurers to continue these plans.

House Speaker John Boeher said he plans to go forward with a Friday vote on the Upton bill. When asked if Democrats in the House would propose their own legislative fix, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters, "We'll do what we have to do."

"My guess is that because the House and Senate proposals all go further in their own way, I would expect that they would stick around for awhile," Levitt said.

[FBD]

its like fixing the cracks in the sidewalk with peanut butter :lol:

[Acid Trip]

Obama has no Constitutional authority to do what he outlined. How the fuck does he keep getting away with selective enforcement of law?

[PorkChopSandwiches]

Because nobody will stand up, he has plenty of impeachable offense if anyone would make an effort.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

You can't impeach a black president, that makes you racist :hand:

[Acid Trip]

You can't impeach a black president, that makes you racist :hand:

:sad:

But I don't wanna be racist!

[FBD]

we could always lynch the mother fucker

[PorkChopSandwiches]

http://i.imgur.com/oEyqF0Y.gif

[Goofy]

http://i.imgur.com/5V3wrKn.gif














8-[

[Teh One Who Knocks]

http://i.imgur.com/PU5WkbA.gif

[Teh One Who Knocks]

http://i.imgur.com/gTWYBJh.gif

[PorkChopSandwiches]

http://i.imgur.com/wQXkMS3.gif

[Muddy]

Oooh boy. :lol:

[perrhaps]

I'll bet that damn George Bush is at the bottom of all these problems.

[FBD]

Total Healthcare "Enrollment" As A Result Of Obamacare: -3.9 Million

"We fumbled the rollout on this health-care law," could be President Obama's understatement of the century. In the month-or-so since Obamacare was unleashed 106,185 people enrolled (based on a loose re-definition by the White House). However, in that same period, the WSJ reports a stunning 4.02 million people received policy cancellations. So, in a month, a total of 3,918,205 fewer people are now 'enrolled' in a heathcare plan than before Obamacare. So far, California, Florida, and Washington are suffering the most under Obamacare...

And here's the states where the coverage cancellations are the greatest...

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2013/11/20131115_obamacare1.jpg

and the additions and cancellations broken down by state...

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2013/11/Net%20Obamacare%20Additions_0.jpg

[Teh One Who Knocks]

http://i.imgur.com/WlfNzw7.jpg