Breaking News President Announces Cancelled Policies Fix
Breaking News President Announces Cancelled Policies Fix
Yesterday, the President announced that people with health care coverage that is not Affordable Care Act (ACA)-compliant may be able to keep their plans in 2014. Effectively “Grandfathering” of plans purchased after the original law has passed in 2010 There has been a great deal of concern being reported in the national media around the prospect of millions of people losing their health insurance coverage effective January 1, 2014 because of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA” aka “ObamaCare”).
We are awaiting how specifically your State’s Insurance Commissioner will react to this. Questions remain about how this new policy will work, including how insurance commissioners will react, whether insurance companies will choose to continue these policies, what the rates for the policies will be, and whether this grandfathering will extend past 2014.
To be clear, what’s being reported principally has to do with the individual health insurance market in the US which insures approximately 15 million people, or about 5% of the country’s population. Within that segment of the privately insured market, a large percentage, certainly more than half, of individual policies are not considered to be “grandfathered” under the law’s requirements for such status. As a result, to be in compliance with the law’s new mandates and coverage requirements, virtually all “non-grandfathered” policies are scheduled to be terminated January 1st, and it will be up to individuals to replace their existing coverage with new compliant policies after this date.
These recent developments have resulted in
1) President Obama issuing an apology to affected individuals on November 7th.
2) the President’s announcement earlier yesterday during a hastily called press conference at the White House that pursuant to an Executive Order, Americans may keep individual health insurance policies they were told will be canceled because these policies failed to meet requirements established by the new law.
President Obama has left it up to the states to independently determine how they will go about implementing this change which is being characterized as an “administrative fix”. However, since the insurance business is state-regulated, each state will need to determine whether or not they will implement this change, and if they choose to implement it, they will have control over defining some of the specific parameters. Insurance companies will also need to quickly make decisions on how to accommodate this new provision if the change is adapted in a state in which they operate.
Please be sure to reference “Talking Points: PPACA’s employer and individual mandates“, a document that’s intended to give you some current context / perspective and relevant information around these particular subjects.
In closing, if you should have any further questions or comments about the above or the attached, please let us know.We will continue to monitor this issue and all ACA implementation in an effort to keep you informed of new developments. In the meantime, please visit our https://360peo.com/about-us/blog to view past blogs and Legislative Alerts.
