Health Care Blog

President Obama Announces New Steps to Help Americans Receiving Insurance Cancellation Notices

President Barack Obama answers questions at a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Nov. 14, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In the past few weeks, some Americans have been notified by their health insurance companies that plans they bought on the old individual insurance market are being cancelled – often because these plans no longer meet the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to cover basic benefits like prescription drugs or doctors’ visits.

Today, President Obama announced that insurers can offer these customers the option to renew their 2013 health plans in 2014, without change, allowing them to keep their plans. 

Already, people who have plans that predate the Affordable Care Act can keep those plans if they haven’t changed. That was already in the law. That's what's called a grandfather clause. It was included in the law. Today, we're going to extend that principle both to people whose plans have changed since the law took effect, and to people who bought plans since the law took effect.

"The bottom line, President Obama said, is that "insurers can extend current plans that would otherwise be canceled into 2014, and Americans whose plans have been canceled can choose to re-enroll in the same kind of plan."

President Obama pointed out that the individual insurance market had serious problems before the Affordable Care Act. "And it’s important that we don’t pretend that somehow that’s a place worth going back to. Too often, it works fine as long as you stay healthy; it doesn’t work well when you’re sick," he said. "So year after year, Americans were routinely exposed to financial ruin, or denied coverage due to minor preexisting conditions, or dropped from coverage altogether – even if they paid their premiums on time."   

Creating new protections for people in the individual market – preventing them from being charged more because of a pre-existing condition or getting fewer benefits like mental health services or prescription drugs – “is one of the reasons we pursued this reform in the first place,” President Obama said.

Here's Why Every State Should Expand Medicaid Through Obamacare

"Because of this document--and the long years of struggle which so many have put into creating it--in this town, and a thousand other towns like it, there are men and women in pain who will now find ease. There are those, alone in suffering who will now hear the sound of some approaching footsteps coming to help. There are those fearing the terrible darkness of despairing poverty--despite their long years of labor and expectation--who will now look up to see the light of hope and realization.

There just can be no satisfaction, nor any act of leadership, that gives greater satisfaction than this.”

Those are the words of Lyndon B. Johnson speaking in Independence, Missouri at the signing of the Social Security Amendments of 1965 that created Medicare and Medicaid.

More than 50 years later, the state of Missouri, home to more than 253,000 uninsured Americans who could gain access to care, is one of the twenty four states that refuse to expand Medicaid.  Over 5.4 million Americans could gain access to care in 2014, but won’t because of choices made by their elected state officials.  There are few clearer examples of how political gamesmanship has real life consequences for people.

The administration is ramping up efforts to raise awareness about the how people can gain access to affordable health care if their leaders act. Earlier this week, President Obama visited three states where over 1.5 million Americans could be helped but have been left behind by their governors. At an event in Texas, President Obama expressed concern for those Americans:

“Across this state, you've got a million people -- because this is a big state -- a million people, citizens, who don’t have health insurance that could get health insurance right away if the state of Texas decided to take advantage of it. 

So one of the things that sometimes gets me a little frustrated, although I understand it because I’m in politics, is folks who are complaining about how the website is not working, and why isn’t Obama fixing this, and all these people are uninsured, and yet they're leaving a million people right now without health insurance that they could immediately fix. There’s not a lot of logic to that.”

Yesterday, the President called on Louisiana’s leaders to work together to expand Medicaid – a move that would provide health insurance coverage to 265,000 uninsured residents in Louisiana by 2016:

“Republican governors in states like Ohio and Nevada, Arizona, they're doing it, too. Oregon has already reduced the number of uninsured by about 10 percent. And some of these folks opposed Obamacare, but they did support helping their citizens who can’t get coverage.

“So we want to work with everybody -- mayor, governor, insurance -- whoever it is that wants to work with us here in Louisiana to make sure that even if you don't support the overall plan, let’s at least go ahead and make sure that the folks who don't have health insurance right now can get it through an expanded Medicaid. Let’s make sure we do that.  It’s the right thing to do.