As the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was making its way through Congress back in 2009 and 2010, I’m sure we can all remember, and like it was only yesterday, hearing Barry "Almighty" as he rather famously promised, over and over and over, that if you liked your current healthplan you would be able to keep it. His exact words were, "Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you," Barry said at one rally in July 2009. Going on to say, "First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you." Sure they weren’t.
And now after having fast-forwarded to the present, those who were perhaps just a little too quick, or a little too foolish, to have believed him, are now finding out the hard way that Barry's promises really weren’t worth shit. Because as it turns out, there are literally millions of Americans who, even though happy with the plan that they had, are now seeing, or will be seeing very shortly, their health insurance policies being canceled because they don't meet the requirements of the unaffordable, Affordable Care Act. And according to one health policy expert, Bob Laszewski, there will be roughly 16 million Americans who will eventually come to lose their current health plans because of Obamacare:
"The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration's regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent about 85% of those, 16 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.
These 16 million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law's benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases."
Apparently, Kaiser Health News called up a few insurers around the country and found that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already received cancellation notices. "[T]he cancellation notices, which began arriving in August, have shocked many consumers in light of President Barack Obama’s promise that people could keep their plans if they liked them," according to Kaiser Health News reporters Anna Gorman and Julie Appleby. Look, the warnings for this thing were as loud as they were numerous. And all the trickery that the Democrats had to use to get it through Congress should have been a huge red flag for anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention. And yet, here we are!
"Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent," Kaiser reports. "Blue Shield of California sent roughly 119,000 cancellation notices out in mid-September, about 60 percent of its individual business. About two-thirds of those policyholders will see rate increases in their new policies, said spokesman Steve Shivinsky."
And I am quite sure you will also remember how it was that Barry "Almighty" and every other top Democrat, was out in front promising just how much costs would be going down for everyone. In fact those promises are still being made despite the fact that people are now getting socked with not only higher premiums but higher deductibles to boot. Nothing that we have been told about this thing has in anyway been true, and the lies just keep on coming. And yet, when our side tries to do something about it, they’re the ones who folks are said to be the most mad at. There should be NOTHING that we are not willing to do to rid ourselves of this blatant attempt by those in government to seize control of our healthcare. N-O-T-H-I-N-G!!!!
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