No, you can't keep your health-care plan under ObamaCare

The draft’s own midrange estimates reflect this bleak new world, predicting that 66% of the insurance plans offered by small employers and 45% offered by large employers will no longer be legal by 2013. And the numbers are no better for individual policies. The draft estimates that individual policies relinquishing their grandfathered status by failing to comply with the new regulations will be from 40% to 67%.

Patients who lose their existing insurance will flock to the new state insurance exchanges, sign up for Medicaid or pay the penalty for not having insurance. There will be a drastic shift in health care coverage, and the result will be lower quality care and more government oversight coming from HHS as well as newly formed committees and panels such as the Independent Medicare Advisory Panel. Young adults under the age of 26, who are eligible to join their parents’ plans, will find that 20% of these parents will have plans that are not acceptable under the new law…

Looking at Kaiser/HRET data from 2008-09, the draft suggests that insurance companies, wanting to retain their grandfathered status, should try to achieve mandated cost controls by sharing it among the categories and thereby staying under the regulatory wire. In other words: a smaller change in deductibles, with a slightly larger change in copayments or out of pocket maximums. Imagine the administrative and actuarial nightmare that will cause, as insurance companies struggle to stay alive and keep their patients.