Obama Announces One-Year Extension on Existing Insurance Plans
Stops short of letting insurance companies sell non-compliant policies
With millions of consumers getting cancellation notices for their current health plans, President Obama announced Thursday that he will encourage insurance companies to continue offering their customers the same health plans next year.
"This fix won't solve every problem for every person," Obama said, saying he would consider legislative action to go further. But he appeared to rule out the sort of legislation that House Republicans are pushing, which would allow insurance companies to continue selling new policies, indefinitely, that would not comply with the law's new consumer standards.
"I will not accept" legislation that would "drag us back to a broken system," Obama said.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
If we're going to have a broken system, it's going to be MY broken system.
/Obama
The insurance companies are saying that Obama's exception is unworkable. It seems that those suggesting that this is blame shifting and not a sincere attempt to improve things might have some validity.