Can't keep my old insurance?

I just got an email from my employer, saying "With the beginning of the new insurance laws, Aetna is dropping small businesses in New York as of this Friday, Oct 1." So I am being moved to an Oxford/Liberty/United Healthcare HMO, and don't know yet if I'll be able to continue seeing my current doctor. (Though the plan is $100/month cheaper than what I had.)

Has anyone else here run into something like this?

What happened to "if you like the plan you have now, you can keep it?" I realize that was Obama's way of saying that the government isn't going to force you to change, but the end result of enacting policies that may prompt carriers to change what they offer is that, in effect, they are indeed forcing me to change. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

I know the party line is that what we got, while not not as good as single-payer, is still better than what we had, and I'm sure in many cases it is, but at the moment, it doesn't look that way for me.

Your employer shouldn't have simply repeated Aetna's party line.

So you're saying that Aetna's decision was not influenced by the new laws? Odd timing if that's the case...

explains the timing of this announcement.

Insurance companies and businesses have always been able to provide whatever plans they wanted to provide and this law did nothing to change that.

Over the past 20 years, the companies I've worked for, on an almost yearly bases, changed the plans they offered. Same with the companies that my wife has worked for.

And not only have the changed the plans they offered, they've also decreased the number of plans you could pick from. Back in the 90s, I had about 12-15 plans I could pick from. There were three or four companies offering 3-4 plans each. Over the last ten years, its dropped to one company, and three plans that are nearly identical.

This has been going on long before Obama.

Obama's claim that you could keep your plan if you liked was true. He was countering a GOP LIE which claimed that his plan, the plan itself, would force you to change your coverage. The plan did no such thing.

The insurance companies are simply using "the plan" as their current excuse. Nothing more.

yes, as you and some of the other commenters have have alluded to, I could see where it is certainly possible that Aetna is doing what it would have wanted to do anyway, and is making the health care plan the scapegoat.

For a number of years my family (me, my wife, 3 kids) picked one of the plans my company offered. They tended to provide more coverage for the $$ then the plans her company had.

But that changed a few years ago too. My plans, which had always covered employee, or employee plus spouse, or employee plus family, changed. The "family" option changed to only cover 2 kids. The third kicked you into a different model, and the jump in cost was insane.

So over 2 years ago, we found that it was better for me to stay on my plan, and my wife and 3 kids to move to a plan from her company.

One of the fun games they play is this. The enrollment period for each of our companies are about 3 weeks long. But, they barely overlap.

Last year, we had 3 days to decide.

The insurance companies are evil. And its sad that the country isn't ready to apply death panels to the industry. Maybe one day.

I guess I didn't realize that was unusual.

that the insurance companies are going to strike back and make up for what they've lost, consumer be damned. When I consider this, and, say, Obama's reponse to the oil spill, it's hard not to believe that our president is either laughably naive about big business, or he isn't truly interested in the general welfare of american citizens. And how could somebody not foresee these "unintended" consequences? DUers surely did.

Single-payer was good enough when he was a senator, now that he wants campaign contribs, it's under the bus.

But given that, why on earth is the administration working so hard to alienate its progressive base? You'd think the games would continue in order to continue to reap the rewards. Something doesn't make sense here. I keep hoping I'm missing something that explains it all and justifies the faith I once had in Obama.

out of business - they are in business to make money & they'll find a way to do it if they have to drop everyone who is sick.

This is why we must have Medicare for all - nothing less.

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You can keep your insurance as far as the government is concerned, as far as aetna is concerned, that is a different story.

In my experience with working life, companies go through insurers on a regular basis and every year is a new adventure in mismanaged health care hell, even when the name of the insurance company remains the same. The only thing that has changed, as far as I can tell, is that the insurance cartels are now all blaming Obama for raping us.

and congress to do it.

Dropping plans, raising rates, etc. are all standard practices. Now they just say "Obama made me do it".

Since they now have to cover things like pre-existing conditions, they have a rationale to use cost-plus profit margins on a larger revenue base. The customer abuse will rise to new levels as the covered population is expanded.

This is one of the reasons the stock market responded positively to HCR.

At the last meeting regarding healthcare everyone was talking about the significant out of pocket payments we were paying now that we hadn't before. In addition many were saying the health savings plans had been drained some time ago.

Some found their doctors refused to accept the new carrier even if out of network charges were supposed to be covered for 80% of usual and customary charges and wouldn't take them without insurance.

But for us, this was a corporate decision.

my insurance company dropped my doctor from the ones they covered. And it had nothing to do with a Health Care Bill. And Aetna did something similiar to my mother about 10 years ago. They dropped HER doctor.

The OP doctor wasn't dropped that happens all the time. Sometimes it is the choice of the doctor (a particular carrier or plan doesn't pay enough, too many clients, billing issues, etc).

In the OP the insurance company is ending the ENTIRE plan. The plan will no longer exist period.

My small biz got caught in this just this past May. My husband left his government job 2.5 years ago after we had spoken with BCBS about getting a group plan for our small biz when his COBRA ran out.

We started applying in April of this year and NONE of the insurers are writing plans anymore for small businesses (we were told for any company of less than 200 people). Why? Because insurance companies have figured out that it's too costly for the insurance companies and it's not worth it. People with PECs are getting into these small plans and (gasp!) actually getting coverage!

Furthermore, we were told by our agent that big insurance companies now know that in 2014 everyone is going to be mandated to buy insurance so they have nothing to lose by dropping people now in order to gain millions more in the future. They've already run the risk analysis and come up with the profitability of this - simply let the small fish go for now (foregoing the premiums but also avoiding the high cost PEC risks) with the knowledge that they are going to get millions more customers in the future to average out those damn PECs.

The truth is they have been behaving this way for well over a decade. Consider yourselves lucky.

Whether it's a politician or an insurance exec or just an anti-reform shill. Our current health care costs are unsustainable and nobody is going to be able to keep doing what we're doing. Not even the super-rich.

n/t