A tired-looking President Barack Obama identified two main problems with the Obamacare rollout: 1) Getting the website to work and 2) Patients receiving letters from insurers saying their health plans will be canceled. While the goal for the website is just to give the “vast majority” of Americans access to it by Nov. 30, Obama invented a new solution for the Affordable Care Act’s second big problem.
He said he’ll allow the grandfather clause to encompass health insurance plans to those plans that have been changed since the law took effect. “The bottom line is insurers can extend plans into 2014,” he said. However, it does sound like that choice is still up to the insurers. Insurers extending current health plans must include information about what protections the plans don’t include and inform patients the health insurance exchanges might offer “better options that might help you bring down the cost.”
But, he later noted, insurance companies are “under no obligation” to renew the exact same policies they had before (as in the olden pre-Obamacare days).
According to the Washington Post:
Under the White House’s approach, the Department of Health and Human Services will notify the nation’s state insurance commissioners that they have federal permission to allow consumers who already have such insurance policies to keep them through 2014.
When asked whether his flip-flop on Americans being able to keep their insurance policies affected Americans’ trust, Obama said:
“I think it’s legitimate for (the American people) to expect me to win back some credibility on this healthcare law in general. . . . That’s on me. We fumbled the rollout of this healthcare law.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The rollout mess has overshadowed what the ACA has done well, such as lowering prescription costs for seniors and allowing young people to stay on their parents’ insurance, he said.
Between the apologies, bottom lines and football metaphors, Obama also said the application itself needs to be easier to understand.
“Part of the problem has been the technology. . . but even if we get the hardware and software working exactly the way it’s supposed to. . . what we’re also discovering is insurance is complicated to buy,” he said. (And then probably regretted saying as that soundbite will hurt.) He added his team will be working on ways to put the exchange applications “in English instead of Bureaucratese.”
As for that glitchy website? It’s still a work in progress. Obama said, and rightly so, the federal government doesn’t do information technology procurement well.
Still, Obama refuses to “walk away” from the more than 40 million uninsured Americans and said he doesn’t regret pushing the law through because someone needed to do it.
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