News From Health Insurance Reform

Unimportant months before major components of the noteworthy Affordable Care Act produce results, surveys show that numerous Americans still don't grasp the rudiments of health protection change or the effect it will have on their lives.

As arrangements take shape for the opening of the first-ever open health protection trades this October, the picture is gradually getting clearer in the matter of how President Barack Obama's eager, complicatedly layered health awareness update will influence the country. A portion of the effects have appeared a spot astounding, even heartbreaking.

"No single law can tackle all issues," says Linda Blumberg, a health economist and senior individual at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.c., research organization. "We need to take things one stage at once and realize that this is set to be a proceeding procedure of attempting to change a framework that has imperfections, with business sectors that aren't currently and never have been aggressive, and develop to (a) more proficient procurement of high caliber consideration."

With the full impact of social insurance change months away, here are six Obamacare outcomes that are becoming exposed --some unforeseen, others that just appear that way.

You could lose your existing health plan
In 2009, Obama reassured Americans, "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."
So why are some insurers notifying policyholders that their health plan is being discontinued?
The short answer: Insurers are phasing out some plans and are replacing them with others designed to meet the new federal minimum value and affordability standards for individual and small-business plans under health insurance reform.
Technically, you can still hold onto your policy, thanks to language in the law that allowed existing health plans to be "grandfathered" in, thus exempting them from the new requirements. But experts say once you're offered better coverage for less, why wouldn't you make a move?

"You can keep that policy, but you may very well not want to," says Blumberg. "A lot of people are going to be making the proactive decision to leave them, so they'll diminish pretty significantly over time."
Big employers may offer bare-bones coverage
Large companies with many low-income and currently uninsured workers, such as restaurant chains and retailers, are flirting with offering a barely qualifying version of barely there "mini-med" health coverage to sidestep Obamacare's $2,000-$3,000 per-employee penalty for failing to offer qualifying coverage.
That "employer mandate" was to take effect Jan. 1 but has been delayed until 2015.
Incorporating so-called skinny coverage that may not take care of X-rays, surgery or maternity care is just one of several cost-cutting options that large employers are exploring to offset the additional expenses of health reform.
Tracy Watts, national health care reform leader at Mercer, a global research and consulting firm, says the goal for these employers is to design a bare-bones plan that costs them less than the penalty for not offering coverage and doesn't appear too enticing to those who currently opt out of coverage or insure through their spouse.
"The question is, how many people would have to enroll before you would spend as much as you would on the $2,000 penalty, and do you think that many people would enroll?" she says.