In June 2010, less than three months after Obamacare was signed into law, Health & Human Services released initial regulations regarding grandfathering of insurance plans, defining which types of existing plans could continue to exist without meeting the new laws standards.
By HHSs own admission, most of the 17 million people in the individual market would be forced into transitioning to new ACA-compliant plans sooner rather than later.
The 17 million people who are covered in the individual health insurance market, where switching of plans and substantial changes in coverage are common, will receive the new protections of the Affordable Care Act sooner rather than later, a press release from the time showed. Roughly 40 percent to two-thirds of people in individual market policies normally change plans within a year. In the short run, individuals whose plan changes and is no longer grandfathered will gain access to free preventive services, protections against restricted annual limits, and patient protections such as improved access to emergency rooms.
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In November 2010, HHS modified the regulation to provide even further flexibility for larger companies, even allowing them to change insurance providers without losing grandfathered status, despite already giving them favorable treatment. According to the HHS fact-check:
Previously, one of the ways an employer group health plan could lose its grandfather status was if the employer changed issuers switching from one insurance company to another. The original regulation only allowed self-funded plans to change third-party administrators without necessarily losing their grandfathered plan status. Todays amendment allows all group health plans to switch insurance companies and shop for the same coverage at a lower cost while maintaining their grandfathered status, so long as the structure of the coverage doesnt violate one of the other rules for maintaining grandfathered plan status.
By comparison, HHS regulations for individual insurance coverage ensured that relatively minor changes to these plans for example, an increase in the deductible above a certain amount would result in these plans losing grandfathered status. Whereas the regulations allowed businesses to swap out one insurance carrier for another, buyers in the individual insurance market could not even change plans with the same carrier without losing protected status.
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Only four months later, President Obamas administration would release the regulations, ensuring that most of the seventeen million people with individual coverage would lose their plans, whether they liked them or not.
Really? Smart people that couldn't see how this was all going to backfire when it came out? Smart people that had those meetings in 2009, and told him to run with the lie? Smart people that use the most childish of tactics known to any adult to trash, attack, and blame their political opponents?
don't tell anyone, but this may be the most incompetent group of criminal clowns to ever preside over the American people.
