++She did announce there would be no delay or any more extensions to the open enrollment period because insurance companies need to know what their market looked like for the coming year.
++Igor Volsky is doing some of the best writing about how ACA is revolutionizing the independent health insurance market and all for the better. TPM under Josh Marshall is posting people's experiences with the various exchanges. Today, he posted someone from Illinois who noted that Blue Cross-Blue Shield was cancelling his policy on January 1 but rolling it over automatically. He pointed out that ACA has forced the insurance company to provide their own exchange on its website where ,for the first,time customers could actually compare policies. This was the indirect result of ACA. Other posts entailed several people who have enthusiastically used the California exchange.
++If you want to know what policies are being cancelled, you might educated yourself and Google Consumer Reports' on the subject of junk insurance. Some of these policies cost over $400 per month and basically fail to cover hospitalization,surgery or ambulance service. Someone who actually has such a policy would end up owing serious coin if they needed anything serious done.
++Remember when the question was about the rise in healthcare premiums. Aside from the fact that pre-ACA insurance premiums were rocketing already,the OMB report showed that premiums for the exchanges ran below estimates. So now the issue is about the rise in policies which cover more items and will affect about 13.5 million people, who have to enter the independent market. Even so half these people will qualify for subsidies. Considering that the rest of us have employer-based insurance, we are talking about 5-6 million people who will have to pay more for better coverage. That's out of 235 million or more.
++You have to feel sorry for Kathleen Sabelius having to explain all this to a panel of Republicans who are committed to destroying ACA and who have no clue as to the content of the law. This has stimulated sharp attacks by Democrats over the last two days when GOP members started in on privacy issues when no health information is required to apply on the exchanges because pre-existing conditions no longer apply and finally a Democrat from New Jersey slammed them for refusing to propose anything to fix the situation.
++The media has been dreadful on this issue. Since all of them are over-insured, they haven't figured out how the rest of America lives. The debate is good in that all the junk insurance is being exposed for the damage it has done and the financial burdens it has placed on American families. After all, medical expenses were the number one reason for bankruptcies over the past several years.
++"If you like your policy, you can keep it." This is the big Gotcha on President Obama. Except for the last three years of ACA, these policies were grandfathered in. The problem now is that in year 4 policies have to change to cover a menu of services. So for 3 years, you really could keep the policy you had. So Obama was right, despite everyone trying to show he's wrong.
++President Obama is up in Boston today to show that Romneycare had a rough rollout but that Massachusetts now covered nearly 98% of its population.Naturally, Willard Romney came back from the dead to blast the President and denounce Obamacare. It's almost like his premature attack on Obama for Benghazi that just made him look like the creep he was.
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