Here is the deal, right to the point. If your current health insurance plan does not meet the “minimum standards” of the Affordable Health Care Act, chances are it will be canceled. This sheds light on the fact, the Affordable Care Act main function was to stop such abuses by the shameless private sector health care industry. With that said, President Obama’s former right hand man David Axelrod ?stated that the “vast majority of Americans will be able to keep their existing polices.”
Axelrod was defending a push back from Republicans that President Obama lied to the American people about keeping their own polices if they so desired. The Republicans are using these cancellations as their proof positive of this accusation.
Whitehouse spokesperson Jay Carney ?responded to these accusations:
Well, let’s just be clear. What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there is going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services every insurance provider has to provide. So that an individual shopping for insurance, when he or she purchases that insurance knows that maternity care is covered, that preventive services are covered, that mental health services are covered, that the insurance policy you buy doesn’t have an annual limit or a lifetime limit, that there are out of pocket expenses capped at a maximum level, both annually and for a lifetime.?
See, here is why we are seeing this paranoid rhetoric coming from the same people who just blew 24 billion dollars down the sewer pipe. Americans who have insurance on the existing individual market will now have numerous options available to them and 6 out of 10 will pay less than $100 per month in premiums for better insurance.?
The Republicans know this. The insurance lobby knows this. The health insurance industry knows this.
There have been example after example over the years of a lightly regulated insurance industry selling ?policies loaded ?down with small print legalize jargon. Surveys have revealed that many consumers really did not even know what they were getting with these substandard polices.
Carney added:
?So you could sign an insurance policy, get that plan, pay a lot of up front money, premiums, out-of-pocket expenses, and then find out that because of the fine print, it does not cover the actual condition that you have. That will no longer be the case.
Here are the facts. Most Americans get their health coverage??through their employers, through Medicare or through Medicaid. If this is you, Obamacare does not touch your life, period. You don’t have to change anything. According to Carney:
?Those remaining individuals who do not have insurance at all now will have it available to them through, or don’t have insurance at all and get it through the individual market will now have it available to them through expanded Medicaid services in those states that have accepted the expanded Medicaid program, as well as through the health care marketplaces.
Yes, the American people wanted something done about the out of control health insurance industry. The Affordable Care Act does set a standard that is in the best interest of the consumer. It is in form a consumer protection act as much as a health reform law.
No more fine print that leaves consumers hanging, because of annual caps, lifetime caps, or pre- existing condition clauses, all which render a policy substandard, as they will not be allowed under the Affordable Care Act.
Affordable Care Act is built on the premise that health care is not a privilege, it is a right.
Its seems that the health insurers are doing whatever they can to hide these Obamacare benefits. They know that the Affordable Care Acts is not the big bad boogie monster that its detractors have made out.
What Happens to People whose insurance is canceled because of the Affordable Care Act?
- The bottom line: Almost all of them are going to receive the same or much better coverage, and many of them are going to receive financial help to purchase it.
- The reason that plans are being canceled in the first place is that they don’t comply with Obamacare’s requirement that they cover ?categories of care known as essential health benefits.
- ?62 percent didn’t cover maternity care.
- 34 percent didn’t cover substance abuse services.
- 18 percent didn’t cover mental health services.
- 9 percent didn’t cover prescription drugs.
Par for the course, health insurers have been grossly misleading about these canceled polices, and the president and others have promptly cleared things up.
President Obama remarked:
Anyone peddling the notion that insurers are canceling people’s plans without mentioning that almost all the insurers are encouraging people to join better plans with the same carrier and stronger benefits and stronger protections while others will be able to get better plans with new carriers through the marketplace and that many will get new help to pay for these better plans and make them actually cheaper. If you leave that stuff out, you’re being grossly misleading, to say the least.
In a speech this past Wednesday President Obama addressed this issue more by adding:
One of the things health reform was designed to do was to help not only the uninsured, but also the underinsured. There are a number of Americans, fewer than 5 percent of Americans, who have got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident. Remember, before the Affordable Care Act, these bad apple insurers had free rein every year to limit the care you received or use minor preexisting conditions to jack up your premiums or bill you into bankruptcy. So a lot of people thought they were buying coverage and turned out not to be so good.
President Obama concluded:
Ever since the law was passed, if insurers decided to downgrade or cancel the substandard plans, we said under the law is, you’ve got to replace them with quality, comprehensive coverage, because that, too, was a central premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning. And today that promise means that every plan in the marketplace covers a core set of minimum benefits like maternity continuity and mental health care and hospitalization and they can’t use allergies or pregnancy or a sports injury or the fact that you’re a woman to charge you more. They can’t do that anymore.
So, we hear these trumped-up out-and-out lies coming from the right-wing media machine and once again politicians sensationalized and moreover falsifying the facts. But have you heard that across the country, insurance regulators are cracking down on the private insurance companies, because of the scam they are running on their customers? Probably not.
According to an Addicting Info article, Insurance Scam; How Private Insurance Companies Are Using Obamacare Fears To Rip People Off? here is how the scam works:
How this scam works is that private insurance companies send out letters notifying existing customers that their current policy has been canceled, because of the ACA’s new requirements. They then offer customers a new, ACA compliant policy at far higher rates than what the customer would pay if he went through the ACA marketplace. In most cases the insurance companies do not tell their customers what other options are available or even let them know they have a choice under the new law. Some insurance companies have pressed their customers to sign up for the new policies by a certain date, saying if they don’t, their health coverage will be lost.
The behavior of these insurers should not come as a surprise. They have been gouging, scamming, ?misleading, abusing and out-and-out stealing from the American people since who knows when. This writer would venture since the industry’s inception.
However, there appears to be some enforcement action to combat this unlawful activity.
In Washington, state regulators issued a consumer alert about the scams.
In Washington, state regulators issued a?consumer alert?about the scams.Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler wrote:
Don’t just take what your insurance company says, make sure you shop around. You have the right to buy any plan inside the new exchange or in the outside market. Source (Addicting Info)
In closing, this type behavior by the Health Insurance Industry is the whole reason for the enactment of the Affordable Care Act. Not only was it causing many people to not get help for catastrophic injuries and illness it was an ongoing fraud that was ruining lives with bankruptcy and lack of quality care.
Laura Etherton, a health policy analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, told?TPM:
If you’re an insurance company, you’re trying to hang onto the consumers you have at the highest price you can get them.You can take advantage of the confusion about what people get to have now. It’s a new world. It’s disappointing that insurance companies are sending confusing letters to consumers to take advantage of that confusion. The reality is that this could do real harm.
Source (Addicting Info)
Edited/Published by: SB
