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Promises to Preserve Existing Coverage Fall Flat
Julne 22, 2010
It’s a familiar promise of the Obama Administration: “If you like your doctor and plan, you can keep them.”
What the President and his Democratic allies have long left unsaid is that your existing plan will have to conform to stringent new guidelines set by the Obama Administration; guidelines conveniently omitted from the hurried legislation and left to be determined after it was signed into law.
An early draft of these new guidelines shows the majority of employers will have to make major changes to the health insurance they offer, and that most Americans will lose their existing plans – even if they like them – by 2013.
“What we are getting here is a clear indication that most plans will have to change,” James Gelfand, health policy director for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the Associated Press about the 83-page draft document. “These changes…are most certainly accompanied by a cost.”
Compiled by the Department of Labor, Treasury, and Health and Human Services, the document (which can be viewed in entirety here) seeks to determine “the rules for group health plans and health insurance coverage…under provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act regarding status as a grandfathered health plan.”
Grandfathering is supposed to be the way Americans keep the coverage they already have if they so choose. The grandfathering clause was set up to place new rules on those existing plans while also granting certain exemptions which would allow employers to preserve the coverage they offer.
However, the regulations that would apply to these grandfathered plans would force up costs and limit the number of changes that could be made to them, leaving employers faced with the choice of either absorbing the added cost or lowering wages. If companies, instead, opt to search of new health insurance plans, those companies will then be subject to all the new mandates of ObamaCare, and thus, more government regulation.
The study expects 64-80% of all health insurance plans will have “relinquished grandfather status” by 2013, meaning doctors, patients, and employers will be dealing with an unprecedented level of government bureaucracy within the next few years.
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