How the Obama Administration Made Sure People Couldn’t Keep Their Plans
...Meanwhile, even these grandfathered plans have to comply with a number of new Obamacare mandates — most important, they have to accept applicants regardless of preexisting conditions and charge them the same premiums, they have to eliminate lifetime-spending caps, and they have to cover dependents under 26 for free (there are other rules that also apply to grandfathered group plans). How, exactly, were health insurers supposed to comply with these new mandates (and other ways the ACA is raising costs) without raising customers’ contributions in the way the law says means losing grandfathered status? Obviously, they could have chosen to raise premiums alone — but then customers who don’t expect to use a lot of health care would switch to plans with higher cost-sharing, which ruins an insurance pool.
In other words, the ACA did make it incredibly hard for insurers to continue plans for the millions of Americans who don’t want comprehensive insurance — financially, insurers almost certainly had to adjust them in such a way that they would lose grandfathered status. This isn’t “normal turnover in the insurance market” (though there is plenty of that in the individual market); there’s a reason why an exceptionally large number of Americans are getting cancellation notices this fall....
...The Affordable Care Act as written and passed would have protected the grandfathered plans for a longer period of time and with more freedom for adjustment, but the Obama administration filled out the Secretary Shalls in such a way as to make that much harder, if not basically impossible, to do. The Obama administration’s original, June 2010 rules were actually even stricter, and would have, for example, made it impossible for an insurer or company to change the firms it uses to manage and administer the plan (which needn’t affect coverage and is a simple way to lower costs); those ludicrous restrictions were eliminated, but enough rules remain that it’s, again, near impossible to maintain a grandfathered health-care plan.
