Obama admin changed language of Obamacare regs to hide loss of private insurance

6:41 PM 10/29/2013
Patrick HowleyReporter
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The Obama administration knew years in advance that Obamacare’s “grandfathering” regulation would wipe out many Americans’ existing health insurance plans, according to a leaked draft of a 2010 administration document.

“As noted earlier, deciding to relinquish grandfather status is a one-way sorting process: after some period of time, most plans will relinquish their grandfathered status since plans rarely stay exactly the same. These interim final regulations will likely influence the time frame over which plan sponsors decide to relinquish grandfathered status,” according to a June 2010 copy of “grandfather plan” regulations that was leaked to the public domain before the administration was prepared to release it.

The Heritage Foundation’s Chris Jacobs, who flagged the 2010 error, said that the administration changed or deleted key passages in the document when it published its official version of the document days later.

“The final document was released later that week,” Jacobs told The Daily Caller. “It’s the same on policy, but there were slight changes to the language.”

The administration changed the term “most plans” from its final version of the document, and also deleted an important sentence about “gradual change” from the final version of the document.

“After careful consideration, the Departments opted against rules that would require a plan or sponsor to relinquish its grandfathered status if only relatively small changes are made to the plan. The importance of gradual change outweighs the risk of market segmentation,” according to the document.

“What that essentially means is that over time people will lose their plans and we [the administration] want to get everyone into the Obamacare exchanges,” Jacobs said.
The “gradual change” line was deleted.

“They knew that people were going to lose their coverage, they were just trying to rhetorically lessen the impact. They tried to massage, nuance, and wordsmith to make it sound less bad than the initial draft,” Jacobs said.
The White House did not return a request for comment.

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Tags: Obama, Obamacare

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