President Obama announced today that insurance companies will be permitted to continue to sell health care policies previously barred by Obamacare. Since the implementation of the law on October 1, 2013, millions of Americans have received notice that their individual market plans have been cancelled because of the Affordable Care Act. Remember, President Obama repeatedly pledged that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period.” That pledge turned out to be hollow as the cancellations began to mount. In an effort to keep Obama’s broken promise, I co-sponsored the “Keep Your Health Plan Act,” H.R. 3350, which will ensure that millions of Americans who have seen their policies cancelled under Obamacare will be able to keep them in 2014. For the last six weeks, Americans have been dealing with a broken website, and even worse, a broken promise. The president’s announcement today is proof that his healthcare law is inherently flawed and was sold with false promises. He has essentially admitted that when he told the American people they could keep their current health plans if they liked them, ‘period,’ it simply wasn’t true. Also, I question the president’s legal authority to make such a change in the law, which is why I have supported a legislative remedy to keep his promise for him. Further, it is disturbing that the president has ignored many dire warnings about the law, and has only come forward today because members of his own party are panicking about their own elections. Ironically, the president’s proposal will undermine his own law by keeping people from the individual insurance markets out of the exchanges, which will deprive the entire Obamacare scheme of funding it needs to exist. This is a law that will ultimately die on its own, because the president can only slap so many band-aids on it.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 22:18:40 +0000