Cross-posted at ACA Signups
Remember back on October 1st when I
posted this diary about the Pat Roberts campaign ad which flat-out lied about how many people lost their healthcare policies "due to Obamacare" last year?
Roberts claimed the number was 20,000.
I proved that the number was at most half of that, and more likely ZERO.
Well, guess what?
Roberts said, "20,000 Kansans lost their health insurance because of (Obamacare)."
There’s no official information to corroborate Roberts’ claim. Several thousand Kansans received notices that their insurance plans could not be renewed because they did not comply with Obamacare standards, but the notices were retracted about a month later. Meanwhile, about 57,000 Kansans obtained insurance on HealthCare.gov. If the state follows the national trend, roughly half of these people were uninsured before the law.
We rate Roberts’ claim False.
I should also note that according to the health policy adviser for the Kansas Insurance Department, all of the policies originally scheduled to be "cancelled" due to ACA noncompliance were instead extended all the way out until 2016...
Then in March of this year, Kansas agreed to another transitional policy that allowed all of these policies to continue through 2016.
...which means that I was 100% correct: the number of policies cancelled "due to Obamacare" last year is indeed ZERO...and furthermore, the number cancelled in Kansas this year will be zero, as well as next year.
By the time they are cancelled, there will likely be very few people still even using those policies due to the massive churn rate of people moving onto & off of various insurance policies year to year for other reasons.