Obama administration knew that Obamacare would disrupt private plans
If you read the Affordable Care Act when it was passed, you knew that it was dishonest for President Obama to claim that if you like your plan, you can keep your plan, as he didand continues to doon countless occasions. And we now know that the administration knew this all along. It turns out that in an obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register, administration officials predicted massive disruption of the private insurance market.
Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains whats called a grandfather provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them. But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.
The Departments mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013, wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their grandfather status and become illegal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americansmore than half the populationwas covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.
Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have nongroup and other forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that 40 to 67 percent of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned grandfather status and become illegal, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market.
