New Yorkers who are busy buying health insurance on the state’s new insurance exchange believing that the new ObamaCare plans are “superior” and that their old plans were “substandard,” should be very careful. Read the fine print. Buyer beware. Most of the ObamaCare plans will not let you receive treatment at many of the most respected hospitals. Interestingly, many of the policies that Obama called “substandard” were accepted by these same top hospitals.
Not one of the plans on the New York ObamaCare exchange cover treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, one of the world’s largest and most respected cancer hospitals, according to media reports. NYU Langone Medical Center has agreements with only four of the 19 insurers on the New York exchange. The city’s largest hospital system, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, has agreements with only six insurers.
When millions of Americans first started receiving cancellation notices, President Barack Obama and his spokesman and allies tried to comfort Americans by telling them that the policies that were being canceled were not very good anyhow so they weren’t losing much. In the next breath, Obama told us that the new ObamaCare plans would be better coverage. He labeled many of the cancelled insurance policies “substandard.” That became the excuse for why Americans couldn’t keep the insurance that they liked – it was substandard and they needed Obama to protect them from these lousy policies. The implication was that the ObamaCare policies would be first rate and make sure that Americans received the treatment they needed. However, that promise was also untrue.
First, Obama promised us unequivocally and repeatedly that if we liked our insurance, we could keep it. When that proved to be false, he shifted his promise to “if he liked our insurance and didn’t think it substandard, we could keep it.” That’s very different from the first promise. He also said that if we liked our doctors and hospitals we could keep them too. That too turned out to be false. Given his previous actions, his fallback position will be that if he likes your doctor or hospital, you can keep it. That isn’t what he promised when this was being debated in Congress and it isn’t what he said when he was running for reelection in 2012.
Here’s the dirty truth –ObamaCare plans leave many of the nation’s top hospitals off their covered networks list. This means that millions of individuals and small business employees expected to get their insurance through the New York ObamaCare exchange will have to go someplace else for treatment, or pay for the treatment out of their own pocket. As a result, Americans are finding that they can only keep their insurance, their doctor, or their hospital, if Obama likes them. Since this whole ObamaCare debacle passed without a single vote to spare, it is pretty clear that Obama and the Democrats had to sell ObamaCare as something that would have no impact on people who had insurance, doctors and hospitals that they liked. But that was not true then and they knew it.
The implicit promise used to sell ObamaCare was – everyone who is happy with their healthcare situation will be left alone and that the only people who would be impacted by ObamaCare are those who are not happy with their current situation. Yet, that was always obviously false. Those who made such promises and representations knew better. We know that now. There is documentary evidence, emails, and admissions by a few candid legislators. In any other arena, we would call it a lie. But for some reason because the people telling the lies are liberal politicians, it is considered poor form or even racist to call the purposeful purveyors of falsehoods what they are.