This extension sounds like a huge win for the people who are super pissed about Obamacare.
Yup. It's just another nail in the coffin. At this point, Obama's whole strategy appears to be to stave off as many consequences of this turd as he can until he gets out of office, or at least past the midterms. You realize this new exception directly undermines the whole framework for ObamaCare right?
What coffin? How is the whole framework for Obamacare undermined?
Because ObamaCare was counting on young, healthy people being forced to buy more insurance than they actually needed in order to subsidize the sick people being added to the roles through guaranteed issue. This whole "problem" with people losing their insurance policies was never an unintended consequence -
it was part of the plan.
You don't have to take my word for it - take it from one of ObamaCare's biggest cheerleaders - Eztard Klein:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/13/obamacare-is-in-much-more-trouble-than-it-was-one-week-ago/?hpid=z24. The bill Landrieu is offering [the sa,e thing Obama did today - allowing people to keep their old plans] could really harm the law. It would mean millions of people who would've left the individual insurance market and gone to the exchanges will stay right where they are. Assuming those people skew younger, healthier, and richer -- and they do -- Obamacare's premiums will rise. Meanwhile, many people who could've gotten better insurance on the exchanges will stay in bad plans that will leave them bankrupt when they get sick. "I think it would be a real substantive mistake to do the Landrieu bill," says MIT health economist Jon Gruber, a supporter of the Affordable Care Act.
5. Put simply, the Landrieu bill solves one of Obamacare's political problems at the cost of worsening its most serious policy problem: Adverse selection. Right now, the difficulty of signing up is deterring all but the most grimly determined enrollees. The most determined enrollees are, by and large, sicker and older. So the Web site's problems are leading to a sicker, older risk pool. Landrieu's bill will lead to a sicker, older risk pool. Obamacare has provisions meant to stop an out-of-control death spiral, but higher premiums are a real danger.
6. How much will premiums rise if Landrieu's bill passes? No one knows. "It sure would be good to know how bad that problem is," says Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. "I don’t feel I know." Jon Gruber agrees. "I don’t know how much higher premiums go," he sighs. "I really don’t." I asked Landrieu's office whether they had any estimates. "We expect the impact to be very minimal as this bill is designed as a transitional fix," says a staffer.
7. It's useful to think of this in terms of who, on the margin, should be paying higher premiums: The people who've benefited from the various kinds of discrimination that undergird the current system, or the people who've been victimized by that discrimination? Bills like Landrieu's lower premiums for people who have benefited from the system at the cost of raising them for the people who've been locked out of the current system.
8. Insurers would also freak out. "Some insurers would end up pulling out [of the exchanges] for 2014 because they would say their premiums are now inadequate, and the rules have changed," said Larry Levitt, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. They'd be right, of course.
The truth is, this "fix" isn't even going to work anyway, because most insurers probably can't revert back to the old policies for 2014 at this late date anyway and, again, even if they could, the premiums have to go up anyway to cover the sick people they have to add to the roles. Thus, what Obama is really trying to do is shift the blame to the insurance companies. He'll say "well, I tried to let you keep your old plans, but those greedy insurance companies won't let you have them." In truth, it is ObamaCare that mumped this all up.
