Obama admits to rollout 'fumble' and offers health insurance fix
Move will allow people with existing policies that do not meet minimum Obamacare standards to keep them for another year.
Barack Obama admitted that he had "fumbled" the rollout of his
cornerstone healthcare reforms on Thursday, seeking to defuse a growing
revolt among Democrats with an announcement that insurers could to
continue offering policies that fall short of new standards for
coverage.
The move is aimed at stemming a tide of cancellation letters sent to
an estimated the 3.6 million Americans since new rules were introduced
under the Affordable Care Act on October 1. Obama said the amnesty for
policies that do not meet the act's minimum standards will last for a
year.
Democrats in Congress, hit with a wave of complaints from angry
constituents, had been pressuring for a change in the law to the deal
with the problem.
An apologetic Obama said he needed to “win back the confidence of the
American people” after the problems. “It's legitimate to expect us to
have win back some credibility on this healthcare law and other issues
... we fumbled the rollout,” he told reporters at a White House news
conference.
Under the so-called "administrative fix":
• Insurers will be allowed to extend plans that do not comply with the Affordable Care Act for a year.
• As a condition, they must tell customers of other options available
through the troubled online marketplace at the core of the reforms.
• Customers who do not already have such plans will not be able to sign up for them.
• Insurers will not be obliged to extend the sub-standard policies
and state insurance commissioners will have the power fo block the fix.
The administration hopes it will be enough to satisfy Democrats who
had been supporting a similar proposal in the Senate proposed by Mary
Landrieu. Obama conceded the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act
was politically damaging for his party. "There is no doubt that the
failure to roll out the ACA smoothly has placed a burden on Democrats
whether they are running for office or not. We are letting them down and
I don't like doing that," he said.
Republicans claimed the one-year delay was a cynical attempt to
postpone the issue until after the mid-term elections and repeated calls
for the law to be repealed. John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the
House of Representatives, said of Obamacare: "It is going to destroy
the best healthcare delivery system in the world." The country needs to
"scrap this law once and for all," he added. "There is no way to fix
this."
Boehner said "reasonable Democrats" are working with Republicans "to
give the American people the opportunity to keep the plan they have, and
the plan they like."
White House officials presented their solution on Thursday as a
short-term administrative action that did not require legislation. But
Republicans are still expected to demand more sweeping changes to the
ACA in a bill that comes before the House of Representatives on Friday.
It remains unclear whether insurers or state regulators – who will
receive a letter informing them of the so-called “enforcement
discretion” – will actually act in ways that stop the
cancellations. Officials conceded they had received no such guarantees
from either states or insurers, many of whom were hoping to use the new
law as a way to move customers onto higher-cost policies.
The White House also admits the climbdown may affect the economics of
its already troubled healthcare exchanges, by delaying the anticipated
influx of new customers that were expected to drive down average costs.
An official said it would use a unspecified “stabilising mechanism” to
try to avoid a wider rise in premiums on the exchanges.
This is already a concern after software problems led to much
lower-than-expected enrolment on the exchanges during their first month.
The climbdown follows criticism of Barack Obama for previously
promising that people could “keep their plans if they liked them”, when
in fact this only applied to policies that were taken out before the act
was passed in 2010 and had not changed since.
“I completely get how upsetting this can be particularly after they
heard assurances from me that if they liked their plan they can keep
it," Obama said. He also hinted that further legislation might be
necessary even with the one-year delay. “This fix won't solve every
problem every problem for every person; that might require working with
Congress.”
But the president insisted that his promise that people could “keep
their plans” reflected a miscalculation rather than a deliberate
policy. “There is no doubt that the way I put that forward so
unequivocally, ended up not being accurate.”
Obama also denied that he had been warned in advance of the separate
problems with the online marketplace. “I don't think I'm stupid enough
to say 'this is like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity' a week before it
was launched, if I didn't think it was going to work."
But the president insisted these were all short-term issues. “I am
confident that by the time we look back on this next year, people will
say it's working well,” he said.
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