Obamacare Supporters Hit By Insurance Cancellations

Obamacare fans among the “elite” creative fields in New York City are apparently experiencing something along the lines of voters’ remorse after being booted from their health insurance plans.

In what has developed into a major, ongoing controversy, President Obama repeatedly declared “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” when he was selling healthcare reform via the Affordable Care Act to the American people.

Politifact named this the lie of the year, which is a significant admission in that the website tends to bend over backwards to justify Big Government initiatives. In fact, Politifact is a little late to the party in that it rated the statement “half true” in 2009 and 2012, and even rated it “true” in 2008.

The president also vowed that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

So far, for the most part, it’s only those who buy insurance on the individual market who have been thrown off their plans, and in many cases have been locked out of their existing provider networks and forced to pay higher premiums and deductibles in the process. They also faced with the requirement to pay for coverage they neither need nor want because of Obamacare standards. When the postponed employer mandate begins kicking in in the run-up to 2015, millions more Americans on employer-based plans will find their coverage similarly disrupted.

According to the New York Times, thousands of Obama voters in the so-called creative class — a liberal bastion of support for the president in the Big Apple — such as writers, performers doctors, lawyers, and other self-employed persons, before Obamacare were able to obtain reasonable group-rate health insurance through professional membership associations and other similar groups.

“But under the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage.”

The Times — a publication generally very supportive of the Obama administration — notes that the justification for canceling many plans throughout the country was that they were “substandard” under Obamacare regulations, but that didn’t apply here.

” … many of the New York policies being canceled meet and often exceed the standards, brokers say. The rationale for disqualifying those policies, said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable. Siphoning those people, Mr. Levitt said, would leave the pool of health exchange customers ‘smaller and disproportionately sicker,’ and would drive up rates.”

If accurate, this sounds very much like income redistribution, which critics would argue is a hallmark of socialism.

Summarizing the challenges facing these politically liberal, social-justice-minded professionals under Obamacare, the Times cites a New York City lawyer, described as a lifelong Democrat “who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.”