President offers fix to Obamacare

DPA/WashingtonUS President Barack Obama made a major concession yesterday on his health insurance reform, offering a fix to quell rising outrage from individuals who have had their insurance policies cancelled.The president took responsibility for the frustration that he said Americans must feel when receiving cancellation letters.“I’m the head of this team and we did fumble the ball on it,” he said at a press conference. “I completely get how upsetting this can be for Americans particularly after they heard assurances from me that if they had a plan they liked, they could keep it.”He denied that he purposely misled the public with that promise he repeated over past years.Hundreds of thousands of individuals who purchased their own health insurance plans have received cancellation notices from their providers because the plans do not meet Affordable Care Act standards, forcing them to instead chose a new plan created to comply with the law, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.The cancellations have created a political backlash among people who would like to keep their existing plans and who worry they will have to pay more under Obamacare.Obama’s “administrative fix” will suspend for a year enforcement of the requirements for insurance held by so-called “individual” policy holders who were not previously grand-fathered.It would be left to state insurance commissioners to decide whether they could approve extension of such policies.About 14mn people currently own so-called individual insurance policies affected by the fix. The majority of insured Americans belong to group insurance plans through their employers.Most of those affected by the fix also bought individual plans since the 2010 passage of Obamacare, as health insurance reform is popularly known.The “fix” will not allow insurance companies to sell the same policies to new consumers, who must be covered under the new provisions of the law. The law for example forbids an insurer from excluding or dropping coverage of pre-existing medical conditions.Obamacare limped into the marketplace on October 1 with high ambitions of offering reasonably priced health insurance to millions of Americans through private companies.But the US government website malfunctioned under the crush of applicants, and only 106,000 people were able to sign up for individual health insurance plans in October. Just a quarter of those signed up using the plagued website.The start-up problems not only lent more ammunition to the conservative opposition – which already rode its resistance to a Republican majority in the House of Representatives in 2010 – but are also alarming Congressional Democrats who are worried about reelection in 2014.In addition, the costly government shutdown in October was forced by Republicans in the House who tried in vain for two weeks to force Obama to dismantle or erode health insurance reform.In addition to the 14mn holders of what Obama claimed were often “substandard” individual policies, there are 40mn Americans who have no health insurance.“In a country as wealthy as we are, everybody should have the security of affordable healthcare,” Obama said.Obama said enrollment numbers released on Wednesday were deceptively low.He said nearly 1mn people had completed applications for themselves or families despite the limping website, and nearly 400,000 people had been able to gain access to Medicaid that has provided healthcare for low income people for decades.House Speaker John Boehner questioned whether Obama had the authority to carry out an administrative fix without Congressional involvement.“The White House does not have much credibility,” Boehner said. “The only way to fully protect American people is to scrap this law once and for all.”Republicans plan to pass their own “fix” to Obamacare, which would allow everyone to keep their health care plan indefinitely, Boehner said.Such a bill would need approval from the Democrat-controlled Senate.Obama conceded that his administration’s failure to roll out Obamacare smoothly “has put a burden on Democrats”.“I feel deeply responsible for making it harder for them rather than easier for them to continue to promote the core values that led them (to support reform),” he said.He vowed that the “darn” website would be working better by November 30, and derided Republican plans as something that would “drag us back into a broken system”.