Megan McArdle in a piece titled "Hope Is All Obamacare Has Left":
I wrote on Friday that we know things are bad inside the White House because it's stopped bashing health insurers. The administration's favorite campaign punching bag is now its most valuable ally in
fixing the disastrous launch of President Barack Obama's signature policy initiative. Yesterday brought confirmation from Juliet Eilperin and Amy Goldstein of the Washington Post: The administration badly needs the insurers' help, because there’s growing concern that the exchanges simply will not be ready by the Nov. 30 deadline it set.
That's a big problem. A lot of people with private health insurance are losing their policies. This was supposed to be not so bad because they could go onto the exchanges. Only now, there are no functioning exchanges. If the exchanges aren’t working by December, those people will be in a pickle. Premiums are rising substantially in many markets. For people with incomes below 400 percent of the poverty line, subsidies were supposed to partly offset that price increase. But only policies purchased on the exchanges are eligible for subsidies.
As industry consultant Bob Laszewski writes: “It is now becoming clear that the Obama administration will not have Health.care.gov fixed by December 1 so hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of people will be able to smoothly enroll by January 1.” He goes on to note that we can’t just do the obvious thing and pass an emergency regulation allowing people to stay on their current policies:
Millions of people are facing those cancellation letters. Ideally, we could just say, never mind -- let these people simply stay on their current policies. But here's maybe the biggest irony in this whole mess. The Obama administration may not be ready for Obamacare but the insurance industry is. The health insurance companies spent the last many months rolling their old policies off the books and replacing them with the 2014 Obamacare compliant products -- Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum….
I suppose it might be possible to get insurance commissioners to waive their requirements but even if they did how could the insurance industry reprogram systems in less than a month that took months to program in the first place, contact the millions impacted, explain their new options (they could still try to get one of the new policies with a subsidy), and get their approval?It is possible to imagine contingency plans that the administration could have put into place before Oct. 1. At the very least, it could have been much more generous in allowing people to stay on grandfathered policies. And it could have had the government printing office print up booklets and mail them to every household, giving all the exchange policy options in your county, numbers to call for the insurers, and tables with the possible subsidies. This would still have been a problem, because the exchanges are supposed to attract the young, healthy consumers who are needed to keep insurance premiums affordable for everyone.
There's more and it's all rather revealing and depressing so let's end by sending you over to Frank Weathers who has good news on the HHS Mandate front.
Carry on.