Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina is working with state officials to enact a policy that would allow hundreds of thousands of citizens to keep their current health care plans despite impositions imposed by the Affordable Care Act.
More than 470,000 North Carolinians have received letters informing them that their current health care plans would no longer be offered by their insurer due to new criteria imposed by the Affordable Care Act, said Kerry Hall, spokeswoman for the North Carolina Department of Insurance. Provisions in the ACA, which set up state and federal health care exchanges in early October, raised standards for individual policies, making hundreds of thousands of plans impermissible under the law. Last week, however, President Barack Obama announced a temporary measure that would give insurance companies the option to reinstate the cancelled plans for up to one year.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, the largest insurer in the state, took the president up on his offer and will provide insurance plans to more than 230,000 clients of the 470,000 North Carolinians who have had plans dropped, Hall said.
The company was looking for a way for customers to be able to continue their current plans even before the president made his announcement, said Lew Borman, a spokesman for Blue Cross Blue Shield.
“The decision by the president gave us additional flexibility to carry this forward,” he said.
State officials were pleased with the decision of the company to reinstate the cancelled plans.
“The [president’s] policy doesn’t force [insurance companies] to offer those plans to people who were being cancelled on,” said Hall. “We have encouraged them to do so.”
Hall said it was unknown whether other insurance companies in the state would offer cancelled plans, though the Department of Insurance is optimistic that others would follow suit.
Borman also did not know if other companies would allow for old plans to be resurrected, but he said that the insurance company was happy to fill the consumer demand for maintaining current plans.
“The most important thing is that people get the best health care option for their needs,” he said.
However, it may not matter politically whether other insurance companies offer old plans or not because of BCBSNC’s status as the largest insurer in the state, said Donald Taylor, associate professor of public policy.
Taylor noted that not every state has been as receptive to Obama’s policy as North Carolina. Although the president gave states the option to allow insurance companies to reinstate old plans, many state insurance commissioners have declined to do so.
Borman said that a major reason many customers wanted to continue current plans and not apply for the government exchanges was because of problems with the website that ran the exchange, Healthcare.gov.
“A lot of people were frustrated with their ability to get the kind of information they needed through the exchange,” he said.
Taylor also attributed the much of the demand to hold onto old plans to the failures of the website.
“The failure of Healthcare.gov to work well made this problem tons worse,” he said.
Despite the nullification of many insurance plans by the ACA, Taylor was optimistic that the legislation would result in more people being insured than uninsured.
“If you look at the Massachusetts experience, a large number of people who signed [for the exchanges] up did so within 30 days of the penalty date, which is March 31, 2014,” he said. “It really depends on how well the website works. It will probably end up being better than the most catastrophic imagination of what it might be.”
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