The White House knew all along: Most Americans with individual health insurance plans will get cancellation notices under Obamacare

Read my lips: Obama told the AMA four years ago that 'no matter how we reform health care ... If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.'

Between half and three-quarters of Americans who buy their own health insurance on the open market will lose those plans in the next year as Obamacare is pushed into full implementation, according to a blockbuster report sure to give the White House a new round of health-care headaches.
'No matter how we reform health care,' a newly minted President Barack Obama told a meeting of the American Medical Association in June 2009, 'we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.'
But regulations formulated by his own administration make it clear that the White House never intended to to give Americans that level of free choice about their medical insurance options.
Washington, D.C. buzzed Friday with reports of what NBC News had surfaced: an under-the-radar notice in the Federal Register, which MailOnline has dated to June 17, 2010, laying out the administration's expectation that most people who buy their own health insurance will soon have no options other than paying exorbitant rates or joining the federal government's insurance exchanges.
White House spokeswoman Jessica Santillo told NBC that 'nothing in the Affordable Care Act forces people out of their health plans: The law allows plans that covered people at the time the law was enacted to continue to offer that same coverage to the same enrollees.'
But millions of individual insurance plans don't comply with Obamacare's minimum standards, which include services like children's vision care, dental coverage and reproductive health options that some consumers don't want.
Millions more with policies written before March 2010 will lose the 'grandfather' status President Obama has promised them because of tiny, marginal changes like premium adjustments or revised prescription copay rates.
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White House spokesmanJay Carney conceded Monday that 'it's true that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don't meet [Obamacare's] minimum standards and therefore do not qualify' to survive

Smoking gun: The IRS published official notice in 2010 that it expected most Americans with individual health insurance plans would lose them under Obamacare

I told you so: A spokesman for long-time Obamacare foe Sen. Ted Cruz emailed the NBC News report all over Washington on Monday as soon as it hit the Internet

'Any insurance that you currently have would be grandfathered in so you could keep it,' President Obama claimed during a CNN broadcast in February 2010. 'And so you could decide not to get, in the exchange, the better plan. I could keep my Acme insurance, just a high-deductible catastrophic plan. I would not be required to get the better one.'
John Kyl, then a Republican senator from Arizona, countered with words that now seem prescient: 'That's for a very limited period of time.'
The White House's website continues to communicate the president's earlier promises.
'If you like your plan you can keep it,' one page reads, 'and you don’t have to change a thing due to the health care law.'
Under the Affordable Care Act and the tens of thousands of pages of related regulations, the grandfathering Obama promised only applies to insurance policies that continue, unchanged, from year to year.
Requirements in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 often force health insurers to rewrite their policies annually in order to re-state consumers' privacy guarantees, now well-known as 'HIPPA' rights. That simple act of re-issuing a policy that's identical to the previous one would also render it ineligible for 'grandfather' status.
'A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate and therefore relinquish their grandfather status is 40 to 67 percent,' the IRS wrote on July 17, 2010.

The White House's website continues to claim: 'If you like your plan you can keep it and you don't have to change a thing due to the health care law'

That estimate only covers policies that lose their 'grandfathered' status by changing, and those which Americans voluntarily leave for other reasons. But still more will lose coverage, the IRS wrote, because their chosen levels of insurance will suddenly fail to meet the White House's definition of an adequate policy.

16 million: Health care analyst Bob Laszewski predicts that's the number of Americans who will lose their preferred medical insurance plans in the coming months

The annual total likely 'exceeds the 40 percent to 67percent range,' according to the IRS's statement more than three years ago.



Overall, NBC reported Monday that of the 14 million U.S. consumers who buy individual health insurance plans, 50 to 75 per cent will likely receive cancellation notices during the next year. And the administration has been expecting that outcome since 2010.
That conclusion came as a result of estimates from four sources deeply involved with the administration's work on the Affordable Care Act, one of whom said as many as 80 per cent of individual insurance customers will be short on choices by this time in 2014.
Months of wrangling over the Obamacare law in 2009 included jousting over whether a range of services including mental health and drug abuse treatments, dental provisions and and vision care for children should be mandated for every qualifying insurance policy, even though not all consumers want them.
Democrats generally won those battles, resulting in a minimum set of health insurance standards that has placed most individual policies out-of-bounds. In their places are new, more robust plans expected to bring 'sticker shock' to millions.
Health policy analyst Bob Laszewski, who consults with America's largest insurers, estimated this month that 'as many as 16 million' such policies will be canceled because they don't comply with the Obamacare law. That represents 80 per cent of his estimate that 19 million such plans, provided by neither governments nor employers, are in existence today.

Fox News Channel's Megyn Kelly exploded: Obama 'said "if you like your plan you can keep it, period." If he wanted to be honest, he should not have said "period." He should have said "asterisk."

News networks buzzed late on Friday as they discovered what NBC had found: evidence that the Obama administration has known for three years that the president's promise simply couldn't be kept. This example, from July 19, 2010, hit the Internet five weeks after the IRS published it in the Federal Register (above)

The White House has begun to concede that many Americans who buy their health insurance directly from companies on the open market will lose their current coverage, but counters that most of them will find better coverage on the exchanges, and at a lower net cost when subsidies for lower-income taxpayers are factored in.
Cornered by a reporter on Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney admitted that 'there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide.'
'So it's true,' he said, 'that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don't meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.'
The National Center for Public Policy Research has chronicled recent news reports documenting 1.49 million policy cancellation notices that insurers have already sent customers in New Jersey, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Additional reports in  Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina, the organization said, came without precise numbers.
In California, the Los Angeles Times reports that the recipients of those letters are surprised to learn how much they would have to pay to stay insured without entering a government-run program.
'This is when the actual sticker shock comes into play for people,' Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told the Times. 'There are winners and losers under the Affordable Care Act.'

How long are Americans' memories? Obama's 2009 American Medical Association speech, and the dozens that preceded and followed it, laid down a marker on consumer choice that he won't find it easy to escape

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (L) will face congressional questions Wednesday about the Obamacare rollout and what it means for health insurance consumers. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Marilyn Tavenner (R) will have her turn Tuesday.

On Tuesday a key Obamacare administrator will testify in a House Ways and Means Committee hearing about the unrelated technical failures that have plagued Healthcare.gov, the Obamacare system's main website.
Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will face tough questions about why the website was launched without adequate testing, and why her agency was tapped to coordinate the work of dozens of software contractors instead of a more experienced outside company.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will have her turn on the hot seat Wednesday, when she faces a hostile panel in a House Commerce and Energy Committee hearing.
Sebelius's grilling will likely include broader questions about the Obamacare program. She was asked to appear in Congress last week but declined.

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