Will you lose your current health policy with ObamaCare?

Answer 1

Yes, Under the Affordable Care Act, all Health Insurance policies issued within the united States must be replaced by 2014 with a policy that meets the new minimum coverage guidelines. Regardless of what anyone tells you, they must be replaced with a compliant policy. It's required in the language of the law.

Answer

With the current bill proposed theoretically no you will not lose your own private health care coverage. But the fear is that the national health care policy will be such a bargain you would have to be crazy to not take it, which would drive the private health insurance providers out of business and dramatically raise taxes to pay for the national health care policy called "Obamacare." Whether this would actually happen can only be speculated upon.

Answer

President Obama has said repeatedly that it is an OPTION. This means you choose. You opt for the plan that is best for you. How can having a choice be a bad thing?

Answer

Is this not what the free market, supply and demand in Capitalism are all about? If someone else can do it for less and it would therefore cost consumers less, the consumer should have the option to choose that plan.

Answer

Hundreds of thousands have been sent cancellation notices.

Obamacare is higher than your own coverage in most cases. It is a disaster, and is becoming a joke, because it's so hard to implement.

The left is even asking to extend the deadline one year, because many Democrat senators are up for re-election next year, and they realise just how unpopular this trainwreck of a bill is.

Answer

Like most complex subject, the answer is: it depends.

The ACA does NOT require all existing coverage be canceled. It DOES require certain minimum standards of coverage be met, otherwise the plan cannot continue to be sold. If a plan meets the ACA-standards, any covered person could continue to purchase it as normal.

Insurance companies have had five options when looking at plans that don't meet the ACA's standards:

1. Send a cancellation notice, and inform the customer they will not be providing coverage under any plan.
2. Send a cancellation notice, and inform the customer that they have a choice of several new plans from the company, listing the cost and benefits of each. If the customer does nothing by the cancellation date, coverage will be lost.
3. Similar to #2, except the insurance company informs the customer that if they do not receive a reply, they will automatically be enrolled in a specific plan.
4. Inform the customer that they are automatically enrolling them in a new plan that is ACA-compliant
5. Upgrade the existing non-compliant plan to a compliant plan, without changing anything else.

Based on current sampling, it appears that #2 and #3 are by far the most common situation. For people who had "catastrophic" coverage, #1 is by far the most common (followed by #2), as this kind of coverage isn't allowed under the ACA, and there is no obvious equivalent. #5 is rare, since most companies don't like the administrative overhead of changing a plan's effects - it's simpler to create a new plan, and migrate the customer over to it (i.e. #4 is how insurance companies operate, not #5)

Note that the "customer" can also be employer-sponsored plans, so your choice of plans through an employer can change. Also note that insurance companies have always been able to discontinue coverage and/or change plans with few restrictions, so most people have never actually been able to "keep their plan" indefinitely, even under the old pre-ACA system.

If one excludes the changes in employer-provided plans (which have always changed at the whim of the employer, not employee), roughly 10 million total cancellation notices were sent out, which cover all the above situations. Data is not fully available, but estimates are that roughly one third of all such cancellations will be under case #3 and #4, which will not result in a loss of coverage, even if the customer doesn't do anything. In addition, it is expected that roughly half of the cases in #1 will automatically qualify for Medicaid instead, so there will be no loss of coverage there either. The final results are likely to show that somewhere around 5 million households had to go out an obtain entirely new coverage, though how many of them failed to do so will not be known until mid-2014.

Bottom line.

It's a disaster, expensive, and care will be deficient at best. Now comes the news from the architect of the bill, Jonathan Gruber, that we were lied to about the bill intentionally. And, he called us too stupid to understand the complex bill. Any questions? Good. You were warned.