D.C. Insurance Commissioner Given Walking Papers After Questioning Obamacare Fix
It seems as though a "national conversation" will not be part of the solution to fixing the insurance coverage messes that have followed the launch of health exchanges. The insurance commissioner of Washington, D.C., tried and is now looking for a new job. Courtesy of The Washington Post:
A day after he questioned President Obama's decision to unwind a major tenet of the health-care law and said the nation's capital might not go along, D.C. insurance commissioner William P. White was fired.
White was called into a meeting Friday afternoon with one of Mayor Vincent C. Gray's (D) top deputies and told that the mayor "wants to go in a different direction," White told The Washington Post on Saturday.
White said the mayoral deputy never said that he was being asked to leave because of his Thursday statement on health care. But he said the timing was hard to ignore. Roughly 24 hours later, White said, he was "basically being told, 'Thanks, but no thanks.'?"
On Thursday, after the president announced that he was going to try to get insurance companies to delay cancellations for a year of policies that were not in compliance with the Affordable Care Act's coverage requirements, White was one of the people who worried it would make a bad situation even worse. He issued a statement agreeing with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners that the change "threatens to undermine the new market, and may lead to higher premiums and market disruptions in 2014 and beyond."
The statement has been removed from the department's web site. Sources tell The Washington Post leaders were upset that the statement had not been vetted by the mayor's office before posting.
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