Good Read - "Separating the day's myths and realities on Obamacare"
Even though this article clearly spells out some of the falsehoods about the ACA going around today, I still think the President and Democrats have a problem. The main problem is failed messaging.
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Developments in the rollout of Obamacare are coming with dizzying speed, though not as fast as the pileup of fiction and misunderstanding created by politicians, pundits, and the news media. So here's a list of the latest themes you're hearing on America's healthcare reform, and what they mean.
1. Obama "knew" people would lose their health insurance. This story, chiefly promoted by NBC News, reflects the Washington media's eternal search for scandal, abetted by every politician's instinct to reduce even the most complicated ideas to a sound byte.
It was always clear that many insurance policies serving the individual market wouldn't conform to the coverage requirements set by the Affordable Care Act and would have to be changed. Some were "grandfathered" in, but the rules dictated that any that were changed by the insuring companies--including changes in premiums or other terms--would lose that status.
As a result, millions of policyholders are now being informed that their nonconforming policies are being canceled as of Dec. 31. The idea, of course, is for them to get new policies under Obamacare as of Jan. 1. NBC is breathing heavily over its investigative "discovery" that "because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, '40 to 67 percent' of customers will not be able to keep their policy." mostly because they changed plans.
But is this news? No: The exact same figure was put out by the Obama Adminsitration--in 2010. Here's a release from the Dept. of Health and Human Services from June that year, explaining that "40 percent to two thirds of people" in the individual market normall change plans in a year, and thus would no longer be in grandfathered plans. Did Obama "know"? Yes, but so did anyone else who was paying attention, including reporters covering healthcare.
More at:
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-obamacare-20131029,0,5695979.story#axzz2j9Iu0e9C
