Delaying obamacare isn't possible

One of the things I've been telling friends family & clients is that it really isn't possible to delay the Obamacare mandates.

Why?

Let's use the automobile business as an example. Let's assume that you're releasing a new model effective January 1. Unfortunately, the transmission supplier says they can't deliver transmissions until one month before you're to begin delivery of the new model.

You really can't go back to last year's model and retool all of your factories to kick out new cars; it's too impractical.

For sure, insurance is not the auto business. First, insurance companies don't have the complexities of production runs. At the same time, an auto company has the benefit of delaying release of a product because no one needs that product. Insurance isn't something you can bring 200,000 people on line when 20,000 will have some medical issue beginning January, 2014.

They just can't go back to their customers and say "Hey, remember those policies you used to have? We're going to bring those back". There's way too many complicated actuarial processes, lined up service providers, support staff training, etc. for an insurance company to bring back all those policies in one month when they effectively killed all that off with the Obamacare regulations a year ago.

It cannot be done. It would be like starting a whole new health insurance provider and new policies in one month.

While I find it funny that the Obamunists may finally get their comeuppance, I do believe that we are looking at a first class medical crisis.

Megan McCardle has the time line of the insurance dominoes falling here. You should read the entire thing. It's right out of a Stephen King hospital movie.

Millions of people are facing those cancellation letters. Ideally, we could just say, never mind -- let these people simply stay on their current policies. But here's maybe the biggest irony in this whole mess. The Obama administration may not be ready for Obamacare but the insurance industry is. The health insurance companies spent the last many months rolling their old policies off the books and replacing them with the 2014 Obamacare compliant products -- Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum….

I suppose it might be possible to get insurance commissioners to waive their requirements but even if they did how could the insurance industry reprogram systems in less than a month that took months to program in the first place, contact the millions impacted, explain their new options (they could still try to get one of the new policies with a subsidy), and get their approval?

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