Shot, Chaser, Hangover

Shot:

Glenn Kessler [of the Washington Post] gave Obama three Pinnochios about his claim that insurance companies, rather than Obama, are causing these cancellations.

And his reason for this is New News, which I didn’t know. I thought the main reason for the cancellations was HHS’ bitchy clawback via regulations, making virtually all policies “changed” per the meaning of the law and hence not grandfathered.

And that is true.

But the biggest reason for the cancellation is super-simple.

Individual policies are sold short term — six months, a year, two years. A long policy may be four years of coverage, but less than 5% of policies are sold like that.

So what did Obama do? He promised you could keep any plan that was in effect…

March 23, 2010.

2010.

But Obamacare didn’t go into effect until 2013.

So any plan that was in effect March 23, 2010 and still in effect three and half years later, on October 1, 2013, might be grandfathered (unless other provisions un-grandfathered the policies).

But because of the six month, one year, two years, four years short-term nature of these policies, almost all of them would have already have expired and thus would be ineligible for any grandfathering at all.

Remember, only a policy in effect on March 23, 2010, and still in effect October 1, 2013 could even be considered for grandfathering.

75% to 95% of all policies would have expired by now.

For any longer-term policies that survived this clause… well, that’s when the rest of HHS’ regs kick in to disqualify all remaining policies.

Chaser:

Obama promised on Sept. 26 that people in individual market would keep their plans.

It was less than a week before Obamacare’s exchanges launched that President Obama gave a speech in Maryland about the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. Using a community college in a friendly county as a backdrop, Obama pushed back against Obamacare critics, charging them with “fear-mongering” and mocking them for “crazy” predictions about the law. In that speech, he repeated the promise that the law’s changes would not affect those who already had health insurance. Here’s the “if you like your plan, you can keep it” segment of the speech, which made specific reference to the individual market — the segment hit with hundreds of thousands of cancellations this month because of Obamacare.

Hangover:

OBAMA ISSUES HALF-HEARTED APOLOGY FOR OBAMACARE INSURANCE CANCELLATIONS. I think it was intended as some sort of modified limited hangout, but I don’t think it’s going to play that way.

Related: “Why is Obama apologizing for people losing their insurance? Last week he said they were all junk policies. Was he lying then?”

Exit quote:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The president now is toxic. The thing is called Obamacare. There’s no running away from it. It’s got his name on it. You see the president, you think about the policy and you know it’s a disaster. And the problem for the Democrats is, they are hostage to a bunch of geeks working right now late into the night trying to fix a system which is not just the glitches we talked about. The architecture, the underlying structure of it is wrong.

I think the likelihood of it being fixed, working like you would expect from any normal commercial private website normally by December 1 is pretty small. And the pressure on the White House will become irresistible. If it isn’t up and running smoothly and perfectly, they’re going to start with postponements and then the whole thing starts to unravel.

Faster, please.