A few days ago, I pointed out that many people with employer-provided health insurance plans may not be able to keep the same plan, because even some small changes to employer-sponsored plans could make them forfeit their “grandfathered” status. Duke University health care economist Christopher Conover and I noted in 2012 that the “grandfathering” regulation could have been written much more flexibly to prevent some of this.
On October 30, Chris published an article in Forbes that put some numbers on this abstraction. Based on survey data showing what percentage of plans complied with various provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he estimated that 129 million (68%) will not be able to keep their old health insurance plans, even if they liked them. That does not mean these people will go uninsured. Rather, they will have to buy more expensive plans that include coverages mandated in the ACA.
This result is consistent with figures the Department of Health and Human Services supplied in its 2010 analysis of the grandfathering regulation that established the very restrictive terms an insurance plan had to meet if employers or policyholders wanted to keep it.
The true promise of the ACA is now clear: “If you like your current health plan, tough luck; you will buy a plan with coverage the federal government has decided you must have.”