"First, no matter what you've heard, if you like your doctor or healthcare plan, you can keep it."
To the AMA: "If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”
Unless, of course, you liked your Medicare Advantage plan, or your 'Mini-Med' plan, or your Aetna individual coverage plan...
A spokeswoman for Aetna confirmed Monday that the insurer will no longer sell new individual-market health insurance policies in Colorado and will terminate current policies held by state residents no later than July 31, 2012.
The change represents Aetna’s third major recent pull-back on health-insurance offerings in Colorado. The Hartford, Conn.-based company announced in the second half of 2010 that it will also stop selling new small-group and child-only individual-market policies.
Anjie Coplin, Aetna’s regional director of communications, did not specify in an email to the Denver Business Journal why the company had decided to end its presence in Colorado’s individual health market.
And in a Dec. 21 letter to the Colorado Division of Insurance, Aetna General Counsel Mary Anderson said that Aetna “can no longer meet the needs of its customers while remaining competitive in the Colorado individual health insurance market.”
Insurers have complained that federal health care reform has made offering their product more expensive. Major changes have included the end of lifetime coverage limits, a ban on rejecting policies to children because of pre-existing conditions and a requirement that 80 percent of individual health policy premiums must go to health care rather than to the companies.
The government's own Medicare Actuary estimates that 14 million Americans will lose their current coverage as a result of Obamacare. Other estimates range much, much higher due to basic economics, as illustrated by this report: