Florida Blue (formerly Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida) canceled 300,000 individual contracts, about 80% of its individual business. Kaiser Permanente of California canceled 180,000 individual contracts, about 50% of its individual business. Highmark in Pennsylvania canceled 20% of its individual business. Independence Blue Cross in Pennsylvania canceled 45% of its individual contracts. To date, 1.5 million contracts have been canceled by health plans: more people lost health care coverage during this period than enrolled in Obamacare.
It appears the Obama administration hammered Florida Blue for the publicity because Blue officials are now calling the cancellation a “transition” to Obamacare, although there is no guarantee that the canceled subscribers will enroll with Florida Blue and the cancellations did not mention “transition.” But this begs the question: If you like your health care plan, can you keep it?
President Obama promised that if like your health care plan you can keep it. Obama lied. Over 1.5 million people have already lost the health care plan they liked.
President Obama promised that if you like your doctor, you can keep him or her. Obama lied. Millions of people will be turned away from the doctor they like effective January 1, 2014.
And, it turns out, under Obamacare, upwards of 70% of the individual market in health care will lose their contracts, yet Obama kept promising everyone they could keep their health plan. Obama repeatedly lied to the American people.
Across the country, there are approximately 14 to 16 million individuals who purchase their own health care policies because they cannot obtain employer supplied coverage. They, too, may lose their health care contracts.
How could this catastrophic event occur? Obamacare regulations are so severely restrictive on “grandfathering” current plans, about 85% – or 16 million – must join Obamacare.1
Added to this catastrophic event is the fact that the Obamacare website, healthcare.gov, does not work. About 5 million lines of programming code have to be reviewed and fixed. Anyone who has worked in a corporate system knows that no quick fix exists for this web site.
Added to these combined catastrophic events is the fact Democrats refuse to delay Obamacare. The Republicans wanted to defund or delay the individual mandate of Obamacare. Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats repeatedly said no. Now, no one is saying no. The possibility for delay now exists. The Democrats need not have shut down the government after all.
Added to these combined catastrophic events is the fact that the disastrous web site debut was self-inflicted. The Wall Street Journal reported, “HHS first delayed writing its rules so as not to give Mitt Romney a political target. And CGI [federal contractor] now says HHS told the company in August to disable an existing tool that allowed users to browse health plans without registering. The reason was to let users see only premiums net of subsidies so they didn’t see the real cost of insurance, but the effect was to needlessly clog Healthcare.gov.”2
Added to these combined catastrophic events is the real Achilles heel of Obamacare. The healthy young (ages 18 to 30) must enroll in Obamacare in order to pay for those older folks who are sick. If private health plans do not see the tsunami of young enrollees, Obamacare goes into a death spiral, as there will be more sickly and more costly older people than young, healthy ones.
The rub: the majority of young people, ages 18- 26, are primarily on their parents plan. There is no new revenue realized. The rest of the young people are actually moving to Medicaid. Why? Medicaid is essentially free in comparison to Obamacare. States are already seeing this phenomenon. Why pay for Obamacare when you can claim free Medicaid as your health care coverage?
Added to these combined catastrophic events is the fact that health care workers, spouses and part-time workers around the country are losing their jobs because of Obamacare. Emory Health Group in Atlanta, GA. is laying-off over 100 workers. UPS announced that spouses of 15,000 white-collar workers will lose their health care coverage next year.3 Part-time workers are automatically losing health care coverage under Obamacare. Over 160,000 Walgreen employees are going to lose their health care coverage. A Towers Watson survey found that 12% of employers are going to cancel spousal health coverage next year, an increase of 8% over this year.4 This trend is just the tip of the iceberg.5
Added to these combined catastrophic events is the Congressional Budget Office release that over 7 million people will lose health coverage due to Obamacare.6 It will actually be around 11 million people.
Added to these combined catastrophes, Obamacare has a very narrow network of hospitals and physicians, which means you will probably not be able to keep your doctor or go to your hospital of choice.7
In spite of the failed launching of healthcare.gov, President Obama and the Democrats are touting Obamacare as a great success.
So what else can go wrong?
1www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/millions-americans-are-losing-their-health-plans because-obamacare_764602.html
2Wall Street Journal, Review & Outlook, “ObamaCare’s Political Choices,” October 25, 2013, p. A14
4Ibid
5http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/grusbf5/good-morning-america-heres-those-layoffs-you-voted
6http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message2129717/pg1