Last Wednesday, May 7, 2014, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing on “PPACA [Obamacare] Enrollment and the Insurance Industry.” (PPACA are the initials of the Orwellian formal name for Obamacare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.)
The purpose of the hearing was to ascertain just how many Americans actually have enrolled in Obamacare, as well as who was responsible for the previous round of policy cancellations and who should face blame for the next round.
Six executives of health insurance companies provided testimonies as expert witnesses:
- Dennis Matheis, President ofCentral Region and Exchange Strategy, WellPoint, Inc. Wellpoint is an independent licensee of Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.
- Frank Coyne, Vice President of Operations and Chief Transformation Officer, BlueCross BlueShield Association. The BC and BS companies collectively provide health care coverage for 100 million members, one in three Americans, in every U.S. zip code.
- Mark Pratt, Senior Vice President of State Affairs, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national association representing health insurance plans. AHIP’s members provide health and supplemental benefits to more than 200 million Americans through employer-sponsored coverage, the individual insurance market, and public programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
- J. Darren Rodgers, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). HCSC does business as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, and is the largest customer-owned, non-profit health insurance company in America.
- Paul Wingle, Executive Director, Individual Business and Public Exchange Operations and Strategy, Aetna, Inc.
- Brian Evanko, President, U.S. Individual Segment, Cigna Corporation
On June 15, 2009, when Obama was selling his Obamacare to Americans, he promised: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period.”
As Obamacare began to be implemented, millions of Americans discovered, too late, that Obama had lied, when they were notified by their insurance companies that their health plans had been cancelled. (Go the end of this post for more.)
Obama and the Left then blamed the evil greedy insurance companies for the cancellations, conveniently leaving out the fact that the companies had no choice because those plans were non-compliant with the dictates of the new Obamacare law.
Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo)
In the hearing, Congressman Cory Gardner (R-Colo) sought to get to the bottom of the cancellations. He pointedly asked the insurance executives the reason for the cancellations.
On his website, Rep. Gardner reports that “The witnesses [insurance company executives] confirmed that these cancellation notices were sent out due to the President’s healthcare law.”
That is bad enough, but worse is yet to come.
Millions more Americans will see their plans canceled when Obama’s healthcare law is fully enforced.
How can that be?
Simple.
Obamacare has caused insurance companies to cancel the health plans of millions of Americans because of those plans’ non-compliance with Obamacare. But those cancellations are just the tip of the iceberg because persistent malfunctioning of the Obamacare sign-up website, healthcare.gov, led Obama to keep extending the sign-up deadline, as well as a one-year delay in the full enforcement of Obamacare. That one-year delay, in turn, means that there will be more insurance plan cancellations when Obamacare is enforced in full.
To determine how many more Americans will have their health insurance cancelled, the rapid-fire talking Rep. Gardner asked each of the insurance executives this question:
“How many [health insurance] plans do you currently offer that do not meet the [Obamacare] law’s requirement, but you are able to continue offering because of the delay [in Obamacare's full enforcement]?”
All but one of the executives demure, saying they don’t have the exact figures or hard numbers.
One insurance executive Frank Coyne of BlueCross BlueShield Association, however, did answer Rep. Gardner’s question: “3.2 million.”
That means if the other five insurance executives had answered Rep. Gardner’s question, the total number of Americans who can expect to have their health insurance plans cancelled will be in TENS OF MILLIONS.
One last nugget from the subcommittee hearing.
On June 5, 2008, while campaigning to be President, the POS promised: “In an Obama administration, we’ll lower [medical insurance] premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.”
This is what Mark Pratt, senior vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said at the House Subcommittee hearing on May 7, 2014:
“One critically important step that Congress can take to make coverage more affordable is to delay and eventually repeal the ACA’s health insurance tax. The health insurance tax began in 2014 and will exceed $100 billion over the next ten years. The tax is set at $8 billion in 2014, and increases by over 40 percent to $11.3 billion in 2015, and to $14.3 billion by 2018. In subsequent years, the tax will increase annually based on premium growth. We are deeply concerned that implementation of the new health insurance tax is undermining efforts to control costs and provide affordable coverage options. An Oliver Wyman study, commissioned by AHIP, has concluded that the health insurance tax alone will increase the cost of family coverage in the individual market by an average of $5,080 over the ten-year period of 2014-2023. This study also estimated that the health insurance tax will increase the cost of family coverage in the small group market by an average of $6,830 over the same ten-year period. [...] The findings of the Oliver Wyman studies reinforce our deep concern that the new health insurance tax is having a significant negative impact on the affordability of coverage. To address this concern, we strongly support bipartisan legislation (H.R. 763) to fully repeal the health insurance tax, introduced by Reps. Charles Boustany (R-LA) and Jim Matheson (D-UT). To date, 230 House members have cosponsored this bill, including 30 members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. We also support – as a short-term solution – separate bipartisan legislation (H.R. 3367), introduced by Reps. Charles Boustany (R-LA) and Ami Bera (D-CA), that proposes a two-year delay in the ACA health insurance tax.”
There are 8 more broken Obamacare promises. Go here to find out what they are.
H/t WND and FOTM’s Miss May
See also:
- “President Lucifer wrote the Obamacare regulation to cancel your insurance,” Nov. 15, 2013.
- “Obamacare disaster: Health insurances cancelling policies of hundreds of thousands,” Oct. 22, 2013.
- “Elderly Americans in a panic over losing doctors because of Obamacare,” Oct. 25, 2013.
- “OK, We Now Have 1 Million More Losing Insurance,” Nov. 13, 2013.
- “Woman with Stage 4 cancer loses healthplan because of Obamacare,” Nov. 5, 2013.
- “Students at black college lose health plan because of Obamacare ,” Nov. 16, 2013.
- “Top U.S. hospitals are opting out of Obamacare,” Nov. 1, 2013.
~Eowyn
