Or, so says Business Insider, not exactly a paragon of liberal thinking.
For the last few weeks, Republicans have been full of schadenfreude over President Obama's broken "If you like your plan, you can keep it" promise.
Which as anyone with a brain, or more correctly without an agenda, new that President Obama meant no one from the evil gubmint was going to take away your insurance. And suddenly Republicans are oh so concerned about the 3% of the population with individual insurance receiving "cancellation" letters from their insurers.
And as the magazine says - "here comes the real government takeover of health insurance" with the 'fixes' that both Republicans and Democrats, like Mary Landrieu in tough districts, are scrambling to put together.
As Eric Erickson (of all people) notes, Republicans are setting themselves up to force more, not less, regulation on insurers, because they are enjoying catching President Obama in this mildest of 'lies' so much:
[Landrieu's] bill would obligate insurers to continue offering all the plans they offer today unless they entirely exit the health insurance business in a state.
What will Republicans do with this proposal? Do they really want a federal law that says health insurers can't enter or exit specific lines of business?
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) has introduced a bill in the House that would allow insurers to continue offering plans that would have been prohibited under the Affordable Care Act, but his bill is vulnerable to the criticism that it will still lead to a raft of plan cancellations as insurers choose to discontinue plans because the ACA has changed the financial incentives they face.
If Congress really wants to make sure people can take their plans, it will need to use the heavy-handed Landrieu approach; the light-touch Upton approach won't work. Erick Erickson (of all people!) understands this; he wrote a piece this morning called "It's a trap":
The House, with the help of a good number of Democrats, will pass the Upton plan and send it to the Senate. Harry Reid will substitute the Landrieu plan and send it back to the House. The House will be forced to either vote for the Landrieu plan or be characterized as siding with insurance companies against people.
In one fell swoop, the Democrats will have the GOP on record saving Mary Landrieu’s re-election in Louisiana by casting her as the one who saved Americans’ health care plans, and also getting on record as really being in favor of fixing Obamacare with the use of mandates.
Not to mention, it will have very detrimental effects on allowing Obamacare to work, as healthy people with crappy insurance will stay out of the exchanges, forcing exchange premiums to go up. As Matt Yglesias
says:
The Affordable Care Act certainly didn’t include any provisions that prevented insurance companies from deciding to no longer offer certain insurance products. House Republican legislative trolling aside, a law that actually prevented insurance companies from ever withdrawing an insurance product from the market would be extreme regulatory overreach. How would it even work? If insurers were prevented from dropping services from their plans, then they would have no leverage in negotiating with health care providers. Any hospital could demand outrageous reimbursement rates from insurers, safe in the knowledge that it would be illegal for insurers to drop the hospital from their plans. The high costs would swiftly drive the insurance companies out of business; with the insurance companies bankrupted, the goal of preventing people from losing coverage would be vitiated.
Rather than (foolishly) try to ensure that nobody could ever lose their insurance, the actual Affordable Care Act accelerated the demise of a certain class of plan. Politically, that’s now an embarrassment for the White House. Substantively, it’s a huge achievement.
This is media driven politics at its finest, allowing what is happening to 3% of the population to drive the news cycle for weeks, and weak-kneed Democrats are responding by proposing politically driven legislation that will damage the ACA. Maybe we should redirect the media's attention to Benghazi.