HHS contemplating rule allowing them to choose your Obamacare plan for you.
At this rate, the 2016 DEMOCRATIC candidate will run on repealing Obamacare:
Here’s a Friday Obamacare news-dump for you: In a 300-page regulatory proposal released late this afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it is considering changing Obamacare’s auto-renewal rules so that, within the health law’s exchanges, instead of being automatically renewed into your current health plan, you’d be moved into the lowest cost plan from the same service tier.
Essentially, this is insurance-determination-via-bureaucracy: Reason argues that the goal here is to cut down embarrassing premium hikes to policies without having to turn off the imposition of auto-renewal rules… OK, let me back up here. Obamacare currently has auto-renewal enabled on its policies, because without it the signup and membership rate would probably slow, or even decrease. The problem here is that auto-renewal also means lots and lots of future stories about people signing up for policies and suddenly discovering that their rates have gone through the roof. Ostensibly the idea to prevent that is to expect consumers to change policies every year – trust a bureaucrat to think that this would be a thing that people would cheerfully do* – and if they won’t do it on their own, well, let the benevolent hand of HHS do it for them**. What could possibly go wrong?
If you answered A new insurance plan every year, with new paperwork, new networks, new co-pays, new restrictions, new exemptions, and we’re assuming that critical, ultimately highly expensive documents don’t end up in Des Moines with distressing regularity? What can’t go wrong? – congratulations! You exist in the real world. Which is somewhere that Obamacare in general, and HHS in particular, only seem to be sporadically manifesting in these days.
Via Instapundit.
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