With millions of Americans facing the prospect of losing their health insurance in the new year because of the Affordable Care Act, something needs to be done to provide some relief for the people whose health care is threatened by this poorly thought out and poorly implemented law. A bill introduced by House Republicans, led by Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Fred Upton, would offer some help to the people facing the difficult prospect of losing their health insurance, and as I argue in a piece at The Weekly Standard, even though this bill would not be a panacea for the fatally flawed Affordable Care Act, it is a good start.
The concept of the Upton bill is straightforward: it removes the impediments in Obamacare that have forced insurers to issue the cancellations in the first place. Specifically, it would allow insurers to continue offering individual insurance market policies under the state insurance rules that are in effect in 2013. As a practical matter, that means these insurance plans will be able to offer coverage at far lower premiums than the Obamacare-compliant plans will charge because the plans made viable by the Upton bill will not be forced to subsidize the less healthy risk pool that is likely to show up in the Obamacare exchanges. Further, the Upton bill would allow individuals to stay in these reopened insurance plans without fear of being penalized for not enrolling in Obamacare-compliant products.
There has been a lot of commentary recently that the Upton proposal won’t really do much because insurers do not have the capacity to reopen plans in time to get people coverage by January 1. And it is certainly true that reversing the cancellations will entail significant expense and trouble for the insurance industry.
But that does not mean it is impossible. It’s worth noting the California insurance commissioner is forcing two insurers to reverse cancellations for hundreds of thousands of individual market plan enrollees, and the insurers are reluctantly complying to keep people in their plans beyond January 1. In that case, operational issues were not impossible to overcome.
You can read the rest of the post here.