CNS News explains how health insurance companies will respond to the last-minute attempt by Democrats to delay the implementation of Obamacare.
Excerpt:
After President Obama unilaterally changed his health care law on Thursday, the insurance industry issued a warning.
“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” said Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).
Here’s Ignagni’s full statement:
Making sure consumers have secure, affordable coverage is health plans’ top priority. The only reason consumers are getting notices about their current coverage changing is because the ACA requires all policies to cover a broad range of benefits that go beyond what many people choose to purchase today.
Premiums have already been set for next year based on an assumption of when consumers will be transitioning to the new marketplace. If due to these changes fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase coverage in the exchange, premiums will increase in the marketplace and there will be fewer choices for consumers. Additional steps must be taken to stabilize the marketplace and mitigate the adverse impact on consumers.
A recent Weekly Standard podcast predicts that the Democrats are going to come down hard on insurance companies, and blame them for the failure of Obamacare.
Face a revolt among his own party, the President decided to delay the implementation of his own failed health care policy, until after the 2014 elections. He did this to help Democrat candidates in red states to not be thrown out for enacting a policy that will cancel the health care plans of millions of Americans. After the elections, Obamacare will take effect as planned and millions of Americans will lose their health care.
House Republican leaders announced Wednesday the lower chamber will vote next week on a bill that would allow people to keep their health insurance plan if they like it.
The vote hits at President Obama, who, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, said people could keep their healthcare plans if they like them. Millions of people, however, have gotten cancelation notices because of ObamaCare’s new standards.
Late Wednesday afternoon, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) announced via Twitter that the bill would get a vote.
The Keep Your Health Plan Act, H.R. 3350, was introduced last week by House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and more than two dozen Republicans. As of Wednesday, co-sponsorship had grown to 88 members.
Upton’s bill authorizes insurance companies to keep offering plans that they have said need to be canceled because of ObamaCare’s new insurance standards. Since early October, companies have sent out millions of notices to enrollees saying their plans will be scrapped and, in many cases, replaced by more expensive plans.
“Despite the president’s repeated promise of ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it,’ many Americans are now learning the sad reality that their current plan will no longer exist beginning on Jan. 1,” Upton said last week. “Instead they are forced to purchase healthcare that they cannot afford through a system that does not even work, and that’s just not fair.”
The Weekly Standard reports that the Obama administration has threatened to veto the Republican “Keep Your Health Plan Act”. Why? Because the true purpose of Obamacare requires that healthy people get kicked off their plans, and that they be forced to buy more expensive plans that subsidize the treatments of less healthy people.
The chief architect of Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber, explained in a recent interview:
“We currently have a highly discriminatory system where if you’re sick, if you’ve been sick, if you are going to get sick, you cannot get health insurance,” Gruber told host Chuck Todd. “The only way to end that discriminatory system is to bring everyone into the system and pay one fair price. That means that the genetic winners, the lottery winners, who’ve been paying their artificially low price because of this discrimination, now will have to pay more in return. And that, by my estimate is about 4 million people. In return, we’ll have a fixed system where over 30 million people will now, for the first time, be able to access fairly priced and guaranteed health insurance.” Emphases added.
This is monstrous. Gruber admits that “If you like your healthcare, you can keep your healthcare” was a lie from the start. They never even intended to keep this promise, as doing so would destroy their scheme. The system Gruber describes is the intentional demolition of the private insurance industry, which bases prices on risk. He is also defining “discrimination” so far that given the chance, he would abolish capitalism and private property ownership itself.
That’s why Obama has to veto the bill – because he must accomplish his goal of making everyone’s life “equal” regardless of their individual choices. People who aren’t addicted to drugs must be forced to subsidize the drug addiction therapies of others. People who don’t have a promiscuous sex life must subsidize the promiscuous sex lives of others. People who don’t need abortion-inducing drugs must subsidize the abortion-inducing drugs of others. Wealth redistribution to equalize lifestyle outcomes. If you make good decisions in life, you must be punished. If you make bad decisions in life, you must be rewarded. If you earn money and save money because you have a plan of your own for marriage and family, then what you earn and save must be taken from you and given to others who earn nothing and save nothing and have no plans for marriage and family.
Not enough time to make the changes
James Pethokoukis explains that insurance companies don’t have enough time to restore the plans that Obamacare canceled. So the only real effect of Obama’s announcement is to give cover to Democrats who vote against the Keep Your Health Plan Act. That was the purpose of his press conference – to stop a revolt by people in his own party.
First, the numbers from the recent Virginia gubernatorial election, courtesy of the leftist Washington Post.
There were poll numbers floating around in the days leading up to the election that suggested McAuliffe would absolutely swamp Cuccinelli among female voters and, in so doing, win a convincing victory. But, according to exit polls, Cuccinelli only lost female voters by nine points — identical to the losing margin for Mitt Romney among women in Virginia in the 2012 presidential election. (Romney lost women nationally by 11 points to President Obama in 2012.)
Where Cuccinelli did get swamped, however, was among non-married women where he lost by a massive 42-point(!) margin, according to preliminary exit polling. While Romney didn’t fare that poorly in 2012, his 29-point loss among non-married women in Virginia was more than double his losing margin among women more broadly in the Commonwealth.
Here’s the two-pronged problem for Republicans: 1) They aren’t winning married women by nearly enough to make up for their huge deficits among unmarried women and 2) There aren’t that many more married women than single women in the electorate to make up the margins.
So, the fact that married women accounted for 35 percent of the overall electorate and Cuccinelli won them by nine points was more than offset by the fact that single women comprised 18 percent of the electorate and he lost them by six touchdowns.
(Worth noting: The married/unmarried divide isn’t just among women. Cuccinelli won married men by six points but lost single men by 25.)
When you vote for a Democrat, you are voting for legalized abortion through all 9 months of pregnancy, gay marriage, banning guns, higher taxes and massive government spending. So how does the Democrat Party convince women to vote for those policies? Well, you can see how by looking at these official pro-Obamacare ads that are marketed to unmarried women. (H/T Amy)
OMG he’s hot! Obama gives you condoms to have sex with him!
Who did this?
Got Insurance is a project of the Thanks Obamacare campaign, created by the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and ProgressNow Colorado Education to educate everyone about the benefits of the Affordable Care Act.
See, that man is good-looking, but he has no intention of marrying that woman. He has no STEM degree, no self-control, no earned income, and desire to raise children. But she wants to have sex with him because OMG he’s hawt!!!1!, and thankfully her Obama is right there with the birth control pills and condoms to make this “work”. She is so excited to have Obamacare-sex with the hot guy! And who knows, maybe he will call her the next day and ask her what her name was.
Now you might think that appealing to unmarried women like this would not work, but actually it does work. It works because this is how unmarried women see themselves. They want to binge drink. They want to prefer men based purely on appearance and fun. They don’t want men who can protect, provide and lead morally and spiritually. They don’t want men who are “sexist” (chivalrous) and judgmental (honorable). They want to be free to act on their feelings spontaneously and then kill unborn children who get in the way of that. And they want high-earning married men to pay for the condoms through taxes. And if things don’t “work out” with the “hot guy” then they can just blame him for being a cad, and blame the alcohol they drank for making them choose that cad. It wasn’t their fault, so thank socialism that taxpayers are going to pay for it.
The Democrat Party offers unmarried women free condoms and subsidized abortions, so they can more easily engage in recreational sex, and unmarried women respond to that by electing Democrats. According to exit polls, unmarried women like Sandra Fluke voted more than 70% for Obama in 2008 and 2012. This is not my opinion, this is fact. Feminists vote Democrat, and this is feminism in action. Drink like a man. Have sex like a man. Force pro-life doctors to kill the babies. Make pro-life taxpayers pay for the abortion. That’s what unmarried women are voting for – in droves.
Application for Christians
And that’s what is facing marriage-minded men today when they look at unmarried women. That’s an attractive woman in that photo up there. Christian leaders and pastors look at a woman like that with a college degree and a job, and they say to Christian men “you need to man up and marry that fine Christian woman!”. There is almost no expectation among Christian leaders that Christian women be informed about politics, economics, apologetics, and so on. If they look good, then they must be good. And they must vote good. Except they are not and they do not.
The fact is that unmarried Christian women are often very much like unmarried non-Christian women. They believe the same. They vote the same. They watch the same TV and movies. They read the same books. They have plenty of sexual experience – if not from hook-ups, then from preferring non-Christian men to Christian men. We really need to be training unmarried Christian women to be far better at morality, politics, economics, apologetics and so on. Right now, from what I have see in the church, they are woefully inadequate for marriage. We need to look beyond the winsome appearance of Christian women, and make a right judgment about what’s underneath skin level. Instead of being guided by our eyes, and accepting a bare confession of faith, we need to look deeper – for an informed Christian worldview and actions that are consistent with that worldview.
It’s good for Christian men to treat unmarried women nicely, but unless they are qualified to be treated nicely, it does more harm than good. When an unmarried woman is engaging in behaviors that are destroying the lives of born and unborn children, and tearing the fabric of society with government debt, no-fault divorce and single motherhood, then the good man has to make a stand and say “What you are doing is evil.” Unfortunately, many Christian leaders don’t want to do that, so it’s up to regular rank-and-file Christian men to do it.
WINTERY KNIGHT 