Under ObamaCare, Private Med Insurance to be Outlawed

A blogger tripped up President Obama yesterday by citing a provision of the House version of ObamaCare on the future legality of Private Health Insurance. The president said he didn't know.

I think he was lying, but you can judge for yourself.

Private health insurance, if you do not remember, is probably what you have, unless you rely on Medicare and Medicaid, or the VA.

From Investors Business Daily (HT: Red Stater):

What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.

Yes, you read that correctly. No new policies after the public option becomes the law of the land. You could be insured under the last private plan of your life right now.

Is this what you voted for?

The rest of the IBD story:

It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:

"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington's coverage.

The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, "fizzle out altogether."

What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.

This is Transformational.

Ask yourself, if the ObamaCare doesn't go into effect until 2013, why does Congress need to give Obama the political victory of legislation passed by August 1, 2009?

There's no need to rush this. There is a need to make sure that all Americans understand that with ObamaCare's passage, the days of health care freedom are numbered, and so are other freedoms inextricably linked with an individual's lifestyle decisions.

If ObamaCare isn't stopped, some day soon you will hear the president moaning and groaning that he doesn't want to nationalize health care but, doggone it!, Congress passed this legislation that he must enforce, and the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

Or some such horse manure.

OTHER LINKS -- Nina Owcherenko weighs in on the end of private health care insurance with her post "You Will Lose Your Current Insurance. Period. End of Story."

Also the Heritage Foundation rings its "Morning Bell" with more details on how up to 100 million Americans may lose their private health care coverage with the President's (allegedly unread) proposals.