At minimum, 140,000 Minnesotans are poised to lose their current health plan under Obamacare.
In Minnesota, about 280,000 people buy insurance as individuals instead of receiving it through their employers or other groups, a total of roughly 5 percent of the market in the state. Even though some insurance policies purchased prior to the law’s passage in 2010 were “grandfathered in,” thousands have been left out in the cold.
The state’s largest private insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, has apprixmately 62,000 policy holders facing the fallout from the law’s minimum-coverage requirements. Medica has around 50,000 customers who will be affected, while PreferredOne has roughly 15,000. HealthPartners, one of the state’s three largest insurers, has about 12,400 customers who’ll be affected.
Minnesota GOP chairman Keithy Downey, who received a letter from an insurance company offering him a $340 monthly increase in price for his individual plan, declared that President Obama had offered “a classic bait-and-switch.”
Senator Al Franken (D., Minn.) said that he was “concerned for the people whose plans have been canceled because insurance companies altered their policies, as they routinely do, and because some policies don’t meet minimal quality standards.”