Beware: The Koch brothers are running another television commercial in Arkansas.
In this one, a woman named Wanda says her family got its health insurance canceled because of Obamacare despite famous presidential assurances that said otherwise.
To begin: I’m not here to defend President Barack Obama for saying everyone could keep their insurance under the Affordable Care Act when everyone actually couldn’t.
Either the act itself or the administration’s implementation regulations could have provided that any pre-existing policy bought after the enactment of the law in 2010 and before the opening of the exchanges in 2013 was grandfathered.
But neither did.
I could understand disallowing new econo-policies that might have sprung up to try to get people in under the gun with substandard cheap policies. But for the same policy to be acceptable if bought in 2009 but not if bought in 2010 — three years before the new law took full effect with the opening of exchanges — is simply unfair.
I’m here instead to explore the controversy about whether Wanda’s commercial is a load of Kochian hooey, and to conclude that it isn’t, and it is.
It’s accurate. But it doesn’t provide a fuller relevant truth.
In its written message, the commercial reveals its real purpose. It says U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor voted for Obamacare and that Obamacare has harmed Arkansas families.
Vote the rascal out and put Tom Cotton in there, in other words.
Liberal defenders of Obamacare have said that the commercial — officially the work of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch operation — is false because no one in Arkansas has yet actually had health insurance canceled on account of Obamacare.
Everyone is right and everyone is wrong, which is typical of contemporary American political discourse.
Many people in Arkansas have been told their health insurance is going to be canceled. But no one has been forcibly canceled as yet. That’s because the state insurance commissioner and the Obama administration have pushed back the date at which people must give up their non-grandfathered plans that don’t meet minimum coverage under Obamacare.
Here’s the question: Is your health insurance canceled when Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield sends you a letter in late 2012 saying it will be canceled after December 2014, and that, in the meantime, you may keep your current policy under order of the state insurance commissioner?
Or is cancellation a word to be used only for just that, its literal form — cancellation — rather than for a mere notice of future cancellation?
For that matter, the White House has now pushed back the mandated cancellation date for two more years, through December 2016, depending on state insurance regulatory action. And on March 6, Arkansas Insurance Commissioner Jay Bradford entered an order formally extending the authority of affected Arkansas policyholders like Wanda to keep current policies until that further deferred date.
So Wanda, while telling you in somber tones that her family’s insurance has been canceled, actually won’t face that fate unavoidably for more than two years.
No matter, say the conservative defenders of the commercial. She’s going to be canceled eventually regardless of how many politically motivated delays the Democrats provide. And when it happens, they say, it will be the plain doing of Obamacare.
Conservatives also say her rates will soar on that mandated changeover date, although — to be fair and accurate — we cannot know at this point what the approved premiums will be in the health-insurance exchange opening for enrollment in October 2016 for effectiveness January 2017.
I’ll tell you one thing: Those premiums will be lower if we keep the private-option form of Medicaid expansion, which uses federal money to put a quarter-million poor people in our exchange.
So let’s explore in detail what happened in Arkansas on cases like Wanda’s, meaning non-grandfathered policies not meeting the minimum mandates of the ACA.
There were about 35,000 of those policies. “Lost boys,” Arkansas Blue and Blue Shield called them.
To begin, Blue Cross and other carriers petitioned the Obama administration in 2012 to implement regulations allowing people to keep policies that were in existence before passage of the ACA and bought after that passage but before the opening of the new exchanges in October 2013.
Obama regulators said no. But they did invite carriers to go to their state insurance regulators and seek permission to extend those policies for a one-year transition period.
Bradford granted such an order.
So then, in the summer of 2013, Arkansas policyholders in that affected group began receiving letters. They were told that their policies would end after December 2014 and that, after that, they would have to go into the new health exchange to purchase new policies.
They were advised that, for the time being, they either could exercise the option to keep their current policies for the next year or go immediately into the exchange, in which case their premiums would be significantly higher.
So Wanda’s policy was still in effect for a year if she chose to exercise the option to keep it.
Meantime, as October 2013 drew nigh, policyholders in similar situations in other states, where carriers had canceled their policies or the insurance regulator had not permitted a one-year extension, began getting letters of cancellations — actual, immediate cancellations.
That, surely you recall, set off a political uproar resulting in the White House intervening to ask all state regulators to do what the Arkansas insurance regulator already had done — that is, grant a year’s reprieve.
Then, three weeks ago, the Obama White House — concerned about new cancellation notices going out this fall shortly before re-election balloting for embattled Democratic senators like Pryor — extended the reprieve for two more calendar years, through 2016.
Wanda is telling you the narrowly precise truth. She got a letter saying her insurance was being canceled … in more than a year.
What she didn’t tell you, because no one knew it at the time, was that doomsday subsequently would be delayed for two more years.
Doomsday conceivably could be delayed again, considering that there is another big election — this one for president — in the fall of 2016 when the next scheduled cancellation letters would go out.
So the Kochs’ commercial is accurate as far as it goes and in the narrow verbiage it uses. But it does not provide a full and accurate perspective.
What no one can know is what kind of deal on premiums will await Wanda and others when they are required to move to new policies bought on exchanges either in 2017 or after.
What we can know fairly confidently is that rates will be lower if more people are participating — and if, in Arkansas, say, a new governor named Asa Hutchinson doesn’t abandon the private option.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.