"IF YOU LIKE YOUR INSURANCE, YOU CAN KEEP IT"

Arrival of ObamaCare forcing insurers to drop customers with low coverage

The Affordable Care Act was signed by President Obama in 2010 and since then he has repeated one reassuring phrase: "If you like your insurance plan you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn't happened yet. It won't happen in the future."

But it is happening. The president's health care law raises the standards for insurance policies, which many consider to be a good thing. But hundreds of thousands of Americans whose policies don't meet the new standards are being told that their health plans are being cancelled.

Natalie Willes is a sleep consultant who helps parents in Los Angeles train their newborns to sleep. She buys her own health insurance.

"I was completely happy with the insurance I had before," Willes said.

So she was surprised when she tried to renew her policy. What did she find out?

"That my insurance was going to be completely different, and they were going to be replaced with 10 new plans that were going to fall under the regulations of the Affordable Care Act," she said.

Her insurer, Kaiser Permanente, is terminating policies for 160,000 people in California and presenting them with new plans that comply with the healthcare law.

"Before I had a plan that I had a $1,500 deductible," she said. "I paid $199 dollars a month. The most similar plan that I would have available to me would be $278 a month. My deductible would be $6,500 dollars, and all of my care after that point would only be covered 70 percent."

Around 14 million people buy their own health insurance on the individual markets, which is actually about the same as the true number of Americans uninsured by circumstance rather than choice.  Half of those insured will lose that insurance thanks to the mandates imposed by ObamaCare, and will get forced to buy new policies.

Willes will have to pay $948 more a year for the new policy, but that's not all.  She will also have to pay another $5,000 extra on top of that to get past the deductible each year before she gets any benefit from the policy at all. If she's reasonably healthy, all of her medical costs will get paid straight out of her pocket, on top of her insurance policy costs which will now total $3,336, or almost a cool $10,000 after the deductible before she sees any benefit at all.

Her story is just one of hundreds of thousands of similar stories across the country.  So while the Democrats are trying to convince themselves and others that their problems will be over as soon as the website is fixed (whenever that might be) the fact of the matter is that the website is only the portal to much larger problems and ObamaCare will be the main issue in the 2014 election cycle.  Sooner or later, the American people will come to appreciate the party that fought against this monstrosity.