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Here’s a Friday Obamacare news-dump for you: In a 300-page regulatory proposal released late this afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it is considering changing Obamacare’s auto-renewal rules so that, within the health law’s exchanges, instead of being automatically renewed into your current health plan, you’d be moved into the lowest cost plan from the same service tier.
Essentially, this is insurance-determination-via-bureaucracy: Reason argues that the goal here is to cut down embarrassing premium hikes to policies without having to turn off the imposition of auto-renewal rules… OK, let me back up here. Obamacare currently has auto-renewal enabled on its policies, because without it the signup and membership rate would probably slow, or even decrease. The problem here is that auto-renewal also means lots and lots of future stories about people signing up for policies and suddenly discovering that their rates have gone through the roof. Ostensibly the idea to prevent that is to expect consumers to change policies every year – trust a bureaucrat to think that this would be a thing that people would cheerfully do* – and if they won’t do it on their own, well, let the benevolent hand of HHS do it for them**. What could possibly go wrong?
HHS contemplating rule allowing them to choose your Obamacare plan for you
originally posted by: Tardacus
wait so, they aren`t happy with forcing us to buy healthcare now they want the authority to pick which plan we have to buy and make us pay for it?
Imagine if the government picked which vehicle you had to buy and made you pay for it.
instead of being automatically renewed into your current health plan, you’d be moved into the lowest cost plan from the same service tier.
originally posted by: Tardacus
wait so, they aren`t happy with forcing us to buy healthcare now they want the authority to pick which plan we have to buy and make us pay for it?
Imagine if the government picked which vehicle you had to buy and made you pay for it.
The regulations outlined in this proposed rule would be codified in 45 CFR parts 144,
146, 147, 148, 153, 154, 155, 156 and 158. The proposed regulations in parts 144 propose a
revised definition of the term “plan” and amendments relating to the definition of “State” for
purposes of the group and individual market reforms added by the Affordable Care Act.
Finally, we propose to update the cross-reference in §147.104(b)(1)(i)(C) to refer to
§155.725 rather than §155.725(a)(2), to conform with proposed amendments in §155.725
described later in this preamble.
We propose to codify that interpretation by
amending the guaranteed renewability regulations at §146.152(c)(2), §147.106(c)(2), and
§148.122(d)(2).