If you watched President Obama's press conference today, you witnessed one of the worst performances in White House history. Obama's appearance was a long, rambling, barely coherent mess strung together by football analogies and seatbelt similes. At one point he admitted he "wasn't a perfect man" and, while that moment of clarity may count for something, it was about the only incontrovertible point he managed to make.
The meat of his remarks was the announcement that "Insurers can extend current plans that would otherwise be canceled into 2014. This fix won’t solve every problem for every person, but it is going to help of lot of people.”
As he did with DOMA and Immigration regulations, Obama has decided that he'll simply "not enforce" a law. The problem, of course, is that the law in question is his own signature legislation which - at one time - he was proud to call "Obamacare." You may have noticed that the term was conspicuously absent from today's presser.
Another problem is that his "fix" really isn't a "fix" at all. It's a political maneuver designed to pass the cancelled-insurance buck to the insurance companies who've complied with his scam, while offering vulnerable Dems a scapegoat during their 2014 elections.
It's pretty obvious that this won't work. Why?
Insurance companies will hate it, because they've already kicked millions off of their preferred plans. The internal cost to re-instate those policies would be tremendous - so it probably won't happen.
Moreover, a delay does not remove other parts of Obamacare - in particular the mandate that ALL policies include coverage for an expanded array of medical conditions. Also unaffected is the notion that pre-existing conditions cannot be factored into cost. Essentially, Obama just told insurers that they have to offer expensive, compliant, policies - regardless of the health of the purchaser - AND their former, less expensive counterparts. This completely undermines the point of the ACA, since the prices being paid by the young and healthy will no longer be enough to subsidize the sick and elderly.
That brings us to the crux of what Obama is trying to do with this unilateral, unconstitutional, alteration to his own law.
Democrats are desperately seeking anything that will protect them from the Obamacare Hindenburg during the 2014 mid-terms. With the President's new plan in place, nothing has been solved but a bogus talking point has been created. "If you like your plan" you'll still lose it, but probably not until after the elections. In the meantime, if insurance companies comply with the ACA as written and by dump your policy, Dems will start screaming that the big, nasty, fatcats are refusing to help out "the little guy."
It's nothing more than a CYA move designed to pass the buck in an election year. From now on, if you're angry that your plan has been cancelled, don't bother yelling at the Democrats - Obama has "said" that you can keep your plan ...again. Now, you're supposed to be mad at the insurance companies.
According to President Obama, they're the bad guys for following his law. Good luck with making that stick.
