Obama's health-law fix sends insurers, officials scrambling - Washington Post

State regulators across the country said they were blindsided by President Obama’s decision to change a key health-law provision and spent Friday scrambling to make sense of it. Some said they were unsure whether their state laws would allow them to do what the president suggested.

A day after Obama tried to quell anxiety over millions of canceled insurance policies, only a handful of state regulators said they would adopt the president’s fix. Many others said they needed more time to decide what to do because of the complex logistics and far-reaching impact on consumers.

The muddle marked the latest complication for Obama’s effort to salvage his signature health law. Since its passage in 2010, the law has met with strong political opposition, and the launch of the new federal insurance marketplace over the past six weeks has been plagued by technical problems.

The president tried to solve a separate issue — his broken promise that people who like their health plans can keep them — by allowing insurance companies to extend health plans that were supposed to be banned.

But the move is adding to the confusion that surrounds the health-care law and throwing an element of uncertainty into the insurance market. The issue is making some Democrats nervous, particularly those facing tough reelection campaigns next year.

In the House on Friday, lawmakers approved a Republican bill that goes further than Obama’s administrative remedy. While the president called on insurers to give people the option of extending current policies through 2014, the House bill would allow them to continue selling to new customers policies that don’t meet the law’s consumer requirements.

Thirty-nine Democrats backed the Republican bill, representing their largest defection by far on a major or closely watched piece of legislation this year. It faces an uphill climb in the Senate, and Obama has said he would veto it.

Nervous about the potential defections, Democratic leaders deployed several senior aides on the Hill. In the hours before the vote, the aides spoke with, among others, Reps. Brad Schneider (Ill.) and Daniel Maffei (N.Y.), who won tight races last year. But both ended up voting in favor of the legislation.

Even Rep. Matthew Cartwright (Pa.), a passionate defender of the Affordable Care Act, suggested Friday that the Obama administration waited too long to address administrative fixes to the law and put too many Democrats at political risk.

The White House “knew very well that they had to give us something different to support, because simply stonewalling about the president’s promise and why it wasn’t kept was not going to be an option,” he said. Like others in his party, he concluded that Obama’s remedy “has given us something else to get behind.”

Obama and senior White House officials met with more than a dozen insurance executives Friday afternoon. According to an industry official, Obama did not have a specific “ask” for the executives, who reiterated their concerns that young, healthy people might renew canceled policies, leaving sicker and older people on the marketplaces.