Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, is the latest member of the president’s party to propose legislation allowing Americans to keep their health-care plans. Udall’s proposal would protect people’s existing plans for two years, enabling them to keep health insurance that doesn’t meet the Affordable Care Act’s costly mandates, according to the Denver Post.
“I have repeatedly said that the Affordable Care act isn’t perfect, and it will need to be improved as it is implemented,” Udall said. So far, 250,000 Coloradans have seen their insurance canceled this fall, in large part because of the ACA. Former president Bill Clinton urged President Obama yesterday to honor one of the key guarantees undergirding the passage of the Affordable Care Act: his repeated promise that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.”
Democrat senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who, like Udall, is up for reelection in 2014, has proposed legislation to attempt to fulfill the president’s promise that Americans can keep their plans — it would preserve grandfathered plans indefinitely, which is more along the lines of the Republican Senate and House proposals with the same intent.
Other Senate Democrats up in 2014, such as Arkansas’s Mark Pryor and Jeanne Shaheen, have endorsed different tweaks to the law. Udall, along with fellow Colorado Democratic senator Michael Bennet, also favors extending the open-enrollment period for the health-care exchanges.