President Biden’s Collusion with Private Insurance Companies Could Harm Patients

W arning: This is going to hurt.

Federal regulators have issued new rules that will terminate health insurance for sick patients mid illness, leave those patients uninsured for up to twelve months, and permanently increase the uninsured by 500,000 lives. The rules will enrich private health-insurance companies that urged the government to impose them.

Republicans are once again pandering to insurance companies at the expense of the sick, right?

Wrong. These are the Democrats.

A few weeks ago, the Biden administration issued new rules that aim to punish 3 million mostly healthy consumers who choose “short-term limited-duration insurance,” a type of coverage Congress exempts from federal health-insurance regulations — including Obamacare.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, 95 percent of short-term plans are “comprehensive coverage.” They often have “lower deductibles or wider provider networks” than Obamacare plans have. For nine to ten months of the year, short-term plans offer more-comprehensive coverage than any Obamacare plan, since Obamacare is unavailable outside of narrow enrollment windows.

Short-term plans accomplish all this at a cost “as much as 60 percent lower than premiums for the lowest‐cost [Obamacare] plan.” It’s amazing what freedom can do.

To President Biden, the freedom to choose one’s health insurance is a “loophole.” His new rules try to force those 3 million people into Obamacare by punishing them for choosing the “wrong” product. Until now, short-term plans could last twelve months, long enough that enrollees could maintain continuous coverage at least until the next Obamacare-enrollment window. Biden will now require insurers to terminate all short-term plans after just four months.

Consider the impact on consumers who miss Obamacare ’s enrollment window, purchase a short-term plan in February, then fall ill. They will lose their short-term plan by the end of June and won’t be able to enroll in another short-term plan. State insurance regulators and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit have warned that prematurely terminating short-term plans strips sick patients of their coverage and exposes them to medical underwriting. So when short-term-plan insurers deny coverage to those patients, it will be because Biden turned what would have been those patients’ insured medical conditions into uninsurable preexisting conditions.

Since those patients will remain ineligible for Obamacare until the following January, Biden is literally stripping health insurance from the sick and leaving them uninsured for up to twelve months.

This from the man who promised, “If, in fact, you have private insurance, you can keep it.”

The administration admits that these new rules will expose patients to “an increased risk of higher out‐of‐pocket expenses and medical debt, reduced access to health care, and potentially worse health outcomes.” When the Obama administration imposed similar rules in 2016, it terminated coverage for individuals such as 61-year-old Phoenix resident Jeanne Balvin, leaving her with $97,000 in medical bills. But fear not: Biden is also requiring short-term plans to bear a label warning consumers about the harms of his own rules.

The administration issued these rules at the behest of private insurance companies that hope to profit. Insurers who sell Obamacare plans want those 3 million customers — and the additional Obamacare subsidies that would come with them. One group of insurers, the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP), went so far as to petition federal courts to terminate all short-term plans after three months. They literally asked the courts to kneecap their competitors’ customers.

ACAP admitted to the courts that its members were losing “customers to competing companies offering STDLI policies.” ACAP admitted that it wanted the government to terminate short-term plans after three months because doing so would drive business toward its members. One ACAP member predicted a $100 million windfall.

When the courts rejected ACAP’s ploy, it made the same pitch to Biden’s administration. Two months later, the administration proposed today’s regulation.

Rather than admit that he is terminating coverage for the sick to enrich private insurance companies, Biden claims he is “cracking down” on “junk” insurance. Compliant media tell us Biden’s rule would “protect consumers.”

In King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court held that “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets.” The ACA tried to shield the sick from coverage cancellations and medical underwriting. Biden’s new rules conflict with that goal by mandating that insurers do both.

These rules are vulnerable to a legal challenge. It is hard to imagine a regulation more arbitrary, capricious, contrary to law, contrary to congressional intent — and cruel.