ObamaCare architect: It wasn't supposed to be this way

Former senior Obama healthcare adviser and bigtime ACA architect David Cutler maintains that ObamaCare is going to work, and indeed, that law is already reducing medical costs across the board (…yeah, no). He did point out on Fox News last night, however, that without more robust enrollment than we’re seeing now, costs are definitely going to start skyrocketing: “If the numbers aren’t there then the premiums and the exchanges will be very high because the people who will go through the most hoops to get that coverage are those to whom the costs are highest and their coverage is the worst.”

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As to the insurance cancellations millions of Americans are now receiving, he lamented that this is the way the process of implementing ObamaCare is going at the last: People were supposed to want to readily switch from their current plans and transfer into the exchanges, because they’d be able to so easily see how much better off they would be both financially and coverage-wise in the exchanges, and none of this would have been an issue. Back in 2010, Cutler warned the White House that their healthcare rollout was already a botched, glitchy mess in the making, but even if the website had been perfect from Day One… one wonders why so many individuals would volunteer to pay health care premiums at an average of 41 percent higher than before. Via RCP:

KELLY: And you’re saying they can’t get on the website. I understand that. But I’m asking a more fundamental, important point which is these cancellations. I mean, the individual insurance market is essentially going away. Was that foreseen? Was that understood by you, by the president, the team putting this law together that it would happen?

CUTLER: It was foreseen that there would be a lot of transition from policies that were less good into cheaper, better policies through the exchanges but that would be because individuals saw it and wanted to do that rather than they were being pushed and couldn’t see what was in front of them.

KELLY: So when you saw all these cancellations start popping up in the past few weeks and then it was tied back to this [inaudible] application that Kathleen Sebelius had pushed through shortly after Obamacare became law. Were you surprised? Did you say to yourself, wait a minute, this is not how it was envisioned or did you say, yeah, this is about how we saw it going down?

CUTLER: No, this is absolutely not how it was envisioned because what was envisioned is that people would be able to see the new premiums and see the new coverage. And many people would say, you know what, I actually don’t want this old policy because I could get better coverage for cheaper.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 20, 2024
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