Bloomberg and other news sources are reporting that private health insurance plans carried by hundreds of thousands of Americans are being canceled prior to the start of the New Year, thrusting most of these policyholders onto the Marketplaces to find new insurance. Cancelation notices have already begun arriving in the mail for some of the 19 million individual policyholders in the U.S..
The reason? The Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandated new provisions for all policies, including prescription drug coverage and free preventative care, disallowing any plan lacking in any of those provisions come Jan. 1, 2014. Replacement policies for those affected often come with a hefty price increase.
According to Bloomberg, Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Florida are canceling 300,000 policies, and Kaiser Permanente in California says 280,000 are affected. Peter V. Lee, director of Covered California — that state's Obamacare Marketplace — estimates 600,000 to 700,000 Californians overall will lose their coverage, with about a third of those then qualifying for federal ACA subsidies or direct enrollment in Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid provider.
So much for President Obama's oft-repeated mantra that "If you like your insurance, you can keep it."