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NORTON META TAG
15 October 2014
Pat Roberts: Obamacare killed insurance for 20,000 Kansans 15OKT14
CHRISTIAN sen pat roberts r tb KS, in a confusing perversion of his faith, deliberately deceived, manipulated, and lied about people loosing their health insurance in Kansas due to Obamacare / the ACA. His justification for doing so is to hold on to his US Senate seat. WHAT A TESTIMONY! Here it is, from +PolitiFact .....
"20,000 Kansans lost their health insurance because of (Obamacare)."
— Pat Roberts on Wednesday, October 1st, 2014 in a Web video
By Lauren Carroll on Thursday, October 9th, 2014 at 6:39 p.m.
A recent video by
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., attacks his opponent, independent Greg Orman,
and says 20,000 Kansans lost their insurance because of the Affordable
Care Act.
In an unexpectedly tight race, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of
Kansas is doing everything he can to paint his opponent -- independent
Greg Orman -- as a liberal henchman.
One of Roberts’ favorite points is Orman’s stance on the Affordable
Care Act. Orman says he does not support the health care law, but he
also says pushing legislation to repeal it is impractical, because President Barack Obama would simply veto it.
In a recent Web video, Roberts treats that view as support for Obamacare.
The ad starts out with video of Orman shaking hands with
constituents, one of whom asks him a question about repealing Obamacare.
Orman replies, "That’s an interesting question," and moves on down the
line.
"Greg Orman won't repeal Obamacare," the ad’s narrator says, "even
though 20,000 Kansans lost their health insurance because of it."
Roberts was expected to easily win a fourth term (the last time Kansas elected a Democrat to the Senate was in 1932).
Then, Democratic candidate Chad Taylor dropped out, and independent
Orman surged in the polls. Now the race is a toss-up. Some see a Roberts
win as necessary for Republican Senate control in 2015.
Both candidates say they do not support Obama’s health care law, but
we wanted to know how the law had affected Kansas -- did 20,000 people
really lose their health insurance?
The answer, it seems, is no. How many Kansans lost insurance?
We asked Linda Sheppard, health policy adviser for the Kansas
Insurance Department, how many Kansans had lost their insurance due to
Obamacare. She said the state does not require health insurance carriers
to report when people go on or off coverage, so there’s no way to
definitively know the answer.
However, Sheppard said insurance carriers do have to check in with
the department when they decide to terminate a policy. So 20,000 people
losing health insurance would have likely come to her attention.
"We are not aware of any wide-scale cancellation of policies," she said.
Here’s what happened. About a year ago, in October 2013, Kansas’
largest insurance carrier -- Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas --
sent letters to about 9,450 policyholders, according to numerous news reports.
Those members would be unable to renew their plans for 2014 because
those plans do not comply with new standards under the Affordable Care
Act.
Sheppard told us there are no official numbers for how many people
received these notices from insurance carriers other than Blue Cross and
Blue Shield of Kansas.
Roberts’ ad cites the 20,000 figure from an October 2013 story out of Kansas Watchdog, a conservative news website. That story says Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City (which is primarily based in Missouri
but also serves two Kansas counties) sent out notices to about 10,000
Kansan policyholders, on top of the 9,450 from Blue Cross and Blue
Shield of Kansas.
For Roberts, this is where the story ends. But in reality, the
thousands of people who received these letters did not end up without
insurance.
The following November -- after the failed roll out of HealthCare.gov
(Kansas uses the federal marketplace) -- Obama announced that people
who had recieved these nonrenewal notices could keep their policies
through 2014.
Then in March of this year, Kansas agreed to another transitional policy that allowed all of these policies to continue through 2016.
It’s Sheppard’s understanding that Kansas insurance companies turned
around and retracted those nonrenewal notices -- meaning the thousands
of people who received those notices were able to keep their health
insurance.
Retracting the nonrenewal notices caused some behind-the-scenes
challenges for the carriers, but "for the consumer it was pretty easy,"
said Scott Brunner, senior analyst at the Kansas Health Institute, a
nonprofit think tank.
Of course, these policyholders could have chosen not to renew. They
could have picked a different plan, switched to a different provider or
dropped insurance altogether -- but they were not forced out of health
insurance by the Affordable Care Act.
"It is disingenuous to focus on those who lost insurance without
acknowledging that it doesn’t mean they are currently (uninsured)," said
Roberta Riportella, a professor of community health at Kansas State
University who supports the Affordable Care Act.
Roberts’ ad also ignores that the number of uninsured Kansans who have gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Because the state does not meticulously track the number of insured
folks, and the law only became fully implemented this year, it is hard
to know with certainty how many people gained insurance as a result of
Obamacare.
But about 57,000 Kansans are now enrolled in the health insurance
marketplace, Riportella said. If Kansas follows national estimates, then
roughly half of those people were previously uninsured.
There’s no evidence to suggest that more people are uninsured now
than before the Affordable Care Act was implemented, Brunner said.
"The expectation would be that with the Affordable Care Act that the number would continue to decline," he said. Our ruling
Roberts said, "20,000 Kansans lost their health insurance because of (Obamacare)."
There’s no official information to corroborate Roberts’ claim.
Several thousand Kansans received notices that their insurance plans
could not be renewed because they did not comply with Obamacare
standards, but the notices were retracted about a month later.
Meanwhile, about 57,000 Kansans obtained insurance on HealthCare.gov. If
the state follows the national trend, roughly half of these people were
uninsured before the law.
We rate Roberts’ claim False.
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