Tune in here to watch Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, testify before the Senate Finance Committee regarding the disastrous rollout of Obamacare’s federal health insurance exchange website.
Side note: over 160,000 consumers have received health insurance cancellation letters in the mail from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, the dominant individual market player on the state’s federal marketplace. These plans have been canceled because they are not grandfathered plans – plans offered by insurance companies prior to the federal health law’s passage on March 23, 2010.
Individual grandfathered plans can’t newly enroll people after March 23, 2010 and have that new enrollment be considered a grandfathered policy. But insurance companies can continue to offer the grandfathered plans to people who were enrolled before that date. An insurance company can also decide to stop offering a grandfathered plan. If it does, it must provide notice 90 days before the plan ends and offer enrollees other available coverage options.
Of Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s 375,000 individual policyholders, 43% will not be able to keep their health plans. Even if they liked them. Period.
