Obamacare: The law’s new losers

When President Obama sold his health-care law to Americans, he promised that “if you like your plan, you can keep it,” said Peter Ferrara in Forbes.com. That has now been proved a lie. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Americans have been told by insurers they’re canceling their existing, individual policies—that is, those not provided by employers. Florida Blue canceled 300,000 individual policies last week, and Kaiser Permanente in California 160,000 more. All told, 16 million people who buy their own health insurance may lose their current policies. That’s because the law’s new regulations require all policies to provide certain levels of coverage, such as “free” checkups, contraceptives, and mental-health care. Individual policies that don’t include that coverage are being canceled. Even worse, the new policies people will have to buy on Obamacare’s exchanges may cause “sticker shock,” adding hundreds of dollars to their monthly costs if they don’t qualify for federal subsidies.

Let’s look at the “full, nuanced picture” here, said Jonathan Cohn in NewRepublic.com. The cheap, bare-bones plans being canceled exclude basic benefits like maternity or mental-health coverage, or impose “truly exorbitant deductibles” of $25,000 or more. The plans available on the exchanges, however, provide much superior coverage. Yes, Obamacare opponents will trumpet horror stories about “a tiny percentage of the population” with middle to upper incomes who must pay higher premiums. But most people will be eligible for subsidies, and they’ll get better health care, cheaper. The reality is that “making insurance available to people with pre-existing health conditions costs money,” said Josh Barro in BusinessInsider.com. Obamacare pays that cost by expanding the pool of people with insurance, and requiring the wealthier among them to pay more. “If you consider the costs and benefits honestly,” that’s better than the old system.

Easy for you to say, said Ross Douthat in NYTimes.com. But what about a self-employed couple who is now compelled to spend $200 a month more on health-care coverage? They may have preferred the risk of having cheaper, minimal coverage so that they could spend more on child care, or save more for college tuitions or retirement. Is it really wise to thrust this costlier insurance upon them? This emerging class of “Obamacare losers” may very well “drive a further backlash against the law in 2014 and beyond.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up