Author Topic: 68% of Americans won't be able to keep their healthcare plans despite Obama's promise  (Read 1660 times)

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Offline happyg

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About 68 percent of Americans with private health insurance won't be able to keep their healthcare plan if the Barack Obama-proposed affordable health insurance program better known as Obamacare is fully implemented, according to Christopher Conover, a healthcare economist with the Center for Health Policy & Inequalities Research at Duke University.


 
In an interview with The Daily Caller, Conover spelled out his estimates of the consequences of Obamacare.

If Obamacare is fully implemented, at least 129 million of the 189 million Americans with private health insurance coverage (68 percent) will be unable to keep their previous healthcare plan because, Conover says, "they will have already lost or will lose that coverage by the end of 2014".

The number of those who will have their healthcare plans entirely taken away will range between 18 and 50 million, including 9-15 million people with individual health insurance plans and 9-35 million with employer plans, and the rest will keep their old plans but will have to pay higher rates for them, Conover says.

It's hard to imagine that President Obama didn't know that while trying to secure support for his health insurance reform. What's more he repeatedly promised that Americans would be able to keep their healthcare plans if they liked. However, even some current White House officials now admit that the "if you like it you can keep it" promise is technically not true for a small percentage of those insured.

If Obama didn't know that up to 80 percent of small employer plans and up to 64 percent percent of large employer plans would have lost their grandfather status by 2013, he must have been poorly advised by his aids, Conover argues.

 "If President Obama himself believed this the first time he said it, he was poorly advised…The problem is that he said it at least 24 times, most of which occurred after his own rule-writers had estimated that 49-80 percent of small employer plans would have lost their grandfather status by 2013, along with 34-64 percent of large employer plans. The same rule estimated that each year 40 to 67 percent of non-group plans not already grandfathered would lose their grandfather status. Given how extensively presidential statements — especially to a joint session of Congress — are vetted and fact-checked, it is pretty inconceivable that President Obama was not aware that he was engaged in some degree of truth-twisting," the economist said.

So strictly speaking, he concludes, NO ONE who was entirely satisfied with their pre-Obamacare coverage has been able to keep it.

Technically, every single health plan in the US, including both grandfathered and self-insured plans, has already been subject to meeting at least some of Obamacare requirements. But that means that coverage costs will go up. If dependent coverage is expanded to the age of 26, premiums may increase by 1 percent for some in the large employer market, by 2% in the small group market and by 3.5 percent in the non-group market, according to a survey conducted by the Aon Hewitt consulting firm.

Voice of Russia, The Daily Caller
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_11_04/69-of-Americans-wont-be-able-to-keep-their-healthcare-plans-despite-Obamas-promise-3689/