In the course of making an approximation of an apology last week for breaking a promise, President Barack Obama made another promise.
This is a man so full of promise.
At issue is his saying years ago that, under his health-care reform, people who liked their current health-insurance plans could keep them — no matter what, period.
But many couldn’t. People buying individual plans after enactment or holding individual plans that got changed even subtly by carriers have found those plans canceled.
These people learned — in some cases, based on income level — that they are ineligible for subsidies for significantly more expensive options providing a broader array of benefits as mandated by Obamacare.
So with the heat properly on, Obama sat down with NBC last week and said, “I am sorry … they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me. We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”
Thus the president has now promised to do everything he can to “deal with” these dire circumstances.
It’s a more nebulous promise, thus easier to keep. He is learning.
He could always say he had done everything he could but that what he could do didn’t amount to much.
Still, he’s on record committing to try to help. So what’s up with that?
It turns out that, on the day before his apology approximation, Obama met at the White House with 15 Democratic senators up for re-election next year, with our Mark Pryor among them. These senators are understandably worried about having voted for health reform based on a broken promise and sold on a website that doesn’t work.
The Democrats could lose the Senate over this. In Louisiana, Sen. Mary Landrieu, who is up next year, repeated Obama’s promise and now faces 90,000 cancellations in her state.
Pryor didn’t ever quite repeat the president’s promise, so far as know as yet from the record. He came close, but, in this case, his being a tad mealy-mouthed is an advantage.
For example, Pryor said things like this: The Affordable Care Act would “protect and expand individual choice of doctors and insurance plans without any government interference.”
What does that mean? Being forced into the exchange would expand individual choice, I suppose.
And as for government interference, there probably would not be a federal agent at the entryway of your doctor’s office denying your access. But going into a government-established exchange in the first place — that’s a kind of interference, isn’t it?
It’s best not to parse Pryor’s pronouncements.
From what I’ve been told, Landrieu urged on Obama that he could deal administratively with getting the promise kept. For the meantime, she said, she had a bill to grandfather everything through 2013. Pryor and a few other centrist Democrats have signed on.
Obama does not want that — legislation at this date supported by some in his own party to start nibbling away at his signature accomplishment. So he said he would prefer that his people work on a fix.
There are three serious complications to any fix that seeks to extends the grandfather status through this year.
The first is that Obamacare is not one thing, but myriad state things with insurance rates approved by state regulators.
The second is that the approved rates for all these bountiful options on the exchange are based on the rules that were set in 2010 — that is, that relatively cheap individual plans favored by healthy people who don’t expect to go to the doctor much will need to be sidled over into the exchange.
The third is that anything that lets healthy people stay in separate econo-plans burdens the exchanges with a risk pool inordinately weighted to unhealthy people.
None of these complications will deter House Republicans. On Friday, they will pass a bill extending grandfather protection to all the holders of canceled policies. There will be Democratic defections.
And I doubt these complications will deter vulnerable Democratic senators like Landrieu and Pryor.
Those are the ones Obama really needs to help. If Democrats lose the Senate, then simple repeal of Obamacare becomes a greater possibility.
One idea I heard: Nationwide application of the Arkansas model. All canceled plans would get a one-year reprieve and we would hope everything settles down by next October.
It fits our usual strategy — kick the can and hope.
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.