I'm sure people saw their policies cancelled in the pre-ObamaCare days because they didn't fill out paperwork correctly and so forth, but I've never been the guy to defend the health insurance industry no matter what form it took. The problem with ObamaCare is that it took the single biggest factor that made health care so unaffordable - too much reliance on third-party payers - and doubled down on it, making it more bureaucratic, more centrally controlled and more politically manipulated.
ObamaCare took a concept that never made sense to begin with - that you're better off when someone else pays your doctor bills - and made it even worse by retooling it to serve the priorities of politicians. Now the third party to which you're beholded is even less accessible and accountable to you, and you're even more screwed than you already were when you don't do your paper-pushing correctly.
And by "you," I mean nearly 500,000 of you. I hope you enjoyed your "affordable care" while it lasted. Oh, by the way, a whole bunch of you who got subsidies are going to have to pay them back. Good luck with that!
As many as half a million people who signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act this year may lose coverage or need to pay more because they haven't submitted proper documentation, the Obama administration warned Monday.
Some 115,000 people are poised to be cut from insurance rolls at the end of the month because they haven't verified their citizenship or immigration status.
Another 363,000 people haven't sent in the necessary forms proving their income, a key requirement for calculating the size of government subsidies some consumers are eligible to receive under the law.
Together, that represents about 10% of those who signed up for coverage on new federal marketplaces created by the law.
It does not include people in California and other states operating their own marketplaces this year.
Without proper income documentation, some consumers may be forced to repay subsidies that they improperly received, said the Department of Health and Human Services' Andy Slavitt, who oversees the marketplaces.
Now feel free to criticize people who signed up and a) didn't read the rules; or b) didn't do the things they were supposed to do when applying. But let me ask you this: How many of the Democrats who voted for ObamaCare didn't read it? Who would design a system so difficult to use that fully 10 percent of your entire customer base would face the loss of its benefits because they hadn't been able to successfully navigate the system and do everything correctly?
The whole idea of ObamaCare was supposed to be that it would be easier for people to buy health care? We all know now that "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan" was a total lie. So how many people do you think had perfectly good health care, lost it because of ObamaCare, signed up for ObamaCare and now are going to lose it too?
Real health care reform would empower people to be able to pay their own doctor bills instead of being reliant on insurance companies. What the Democrats did instead was to keep you reliant on the insurance companies, but make you reliant as well on the government, which is proving completely inept at running a system it never should have touched in the first place.
