If President Barack Obama said it once, he said it a hundred times: Americans who liked their health insurance would be able to keep their health insurance. Now, on top of a website that still doesn’t work properly, the president is dealing with the fallout from this reality: millions of Americans will not be able to renew their current health insurance policies.

Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye of NBC News made a splash this week with an “investigative” report on the problem:

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”  […]

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”  

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

Igor Volsky pointed out that the findings of NBC’s investigation were public knowledge in 2010. Nevertheless, you can’t really call this story “old news,” because only now are Americans starting to receive cancellation letters from their insurance companies.

Looking only at the public policy side, there are good reasons the 2010 health care reform law included minimum standards for insurance coverage. Sarah Kliff explained at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog,

There are lots of insurance policies, especially on the individual market, that are really bare bones. Some argue they shouldn’t even be called insurance coverage, because their coverage is too sparse to insure against financial ruin. One report from the Obama administration, issued in 2011, found that 62 percent of individual market plans don’t offer maternity care. Eighteen percent do not cover mental health benefits and 9 percent do not pay for prescription drugs.

The health-care law requires insurance plans to cover all of those things, and then some.

This includes spending at least 80 percent of subscriber premiums on medical care (leaving 20 percent for administration and profits), covering 10 benefit categories and providing preventive care without any co-payment.

That means insurance companies cannot, under the Affordable Care Act, keep selling the plans that they used to sell — the ones that don’t cover prescription drugs and maternity care. And that means that some people who liked purchasing coverage without maternity care and prescription drugs won’t be able to keep those plans.

The cancellation notices are a feature of the Affordable Care Act, not a bug. The idea was to make insurance coverage more robust — and that means cancelling policies that offer less thorough coverage.

Forcing health insurers to cover maternity care in every policy might sound unfair to consumers who cannot ever become pregnant. That’s the flip side of the law ending the industry’s previous standard practice of charging women more than men for health insurance.

Ezra Klein, one of the ACA’s leading defenders in the blogosphere, put it like this:

It’s become common, for instance, for the Affordable Care Act’s critics to compare prices sticker prices in the individual market to the prices in the exchanges now. Since it was routine before for a quarter of people to be turned away or quoted a higher price after revealing their health history, this isn’t just comparing apples to oranges. It’s comparing apples to oranges that many people couldn’t even buy. […]

Put bluntly, the Affordable Care Act’s changes are raising insurance premiums for some people who did well under the old system and lowering them for many of the people who were locked out or discriminated against.

A good example of the tradeoffs is the case of Dianne Barrette, a 56-year-old Florida woman who’s been featured in the media because her current plan will cost 10 times more under Obamacare. As Erik Wemple discovered, her old plan was health insurance in name only. It didn’t cover inpatient hospital care, it didn’t cover ambulance services, and so forth. Under Obamacare, all plans have to cover those benefits. So Barrette’s old plan was extremely affordable — $56 a month — because it covered basically nothing. Her new plan is much more expensive but also much more generous.

Which would be fine if the president had been saying these last few years: We’re doing away with junk insurance. Everyone will have access to health insurance with comprehensive benefits. Some of you will end up paying more for your insurance, but most of you will pay lower premiums, and millions of people who used to be uninsurable will have coverage.

But President Obama didn’t make that case for his signature law. On the contrary, throughout last year’s re-election campaign, he kept saying people would be able to keep the coverage they already have. As Kliff says, that’s a “weird promise to make when one of the key goals of the health-care law is to change individual market insurance coverage.”

“Weird” strikes me as too mild an adjective. I would go with “dishonest” or “inexcusable.” The Steve Kings of the world now have rock-solid proof that the president lied, repeatedly, about how Obamacare would affect millions of policyholders. Volsky may be right that many people getting cancellation notices “have a choice of enrolling in subsidized insurance in the exchanges and will probably end up paying less for more coverage.” But again, that’s not the deal Obama promised. He clung to a talking point that was an easier sell politically.

White House spokesman Jay Carney is also lying through his teeth.

“What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide,” Carney said. “So it’s true that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”

Plainly, that’s not what the president said to audiences and television cameras on many occasions.

I’m tired of hearing Democrats make excuses for the president’s lies on this issue. Yes, Republicans have pushed misinformation campaigns about “death panels,” huge fines, and big government getting between you and your doctor. But two wrongs don’t make a right.

Any relevant thoughts are welcome in this thread.

On a related note: Last week I received a letter from Wellmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield blaming the Affordable Care Act for increases in our health care premiums next year. Naturally, the letter did not mention that Wellmark has been raising our premiums by more than 10 percent nearly ever year, since well before the federal health care reform law passed. My family will save a lot of money in 2014 by NOT renewing our Wellmark policy. Instead, we will enroll in one of the CoOpportunity Health offerings through Iowa’s exchange.

I would like to hear from Bleeding Heartland readers who currently buy their own individual or family health insurance policies. Are your premiums going up? Has your policy been cancelled? Were you able to find a better deal on the exchange?

UPDATE: Representative Bruce Braley was asked about this controversy during an October 30 conference call with Iowa reporters. He commented,

Republicans have been critical of the cancellation of insurance policies linked to the federal health care plan, but Braley says those polices are being canceled because the federal plan has better options. “A lot of the policies that are being terminated have to do with very basic forms of coverage that don’t provide the type of benefits that most Americans need in the basic health insurance plan. And that’s one of the reasons why some of these termination notices are being sent out,” according to Braley.

Braley was asked if the administration knew that these types of cancellations would happen and if the public should have been warned. He says insurance companies have been canceling policies without justification long before the so-called Obamacare was developed – but says many of the cancellations now are during renewals. “New requirements that are in place that require these policies to cover preexisting conditions,  making sure women aren’t paying more than men, and the other protections – the consumer protections – in the bill, often weren’t included in some of these early polices, and that’s why I understand it that some of these notices are going out,” Braley says.