The President’s ObamaCare “fix” might not fly in New York.
A growing list of states are refusing to go along with President Obama’s plan to extend insurance policies canceled due to ObamaCare for one year — and New York remains undecided.
State Sen. Marty Golden (R-Brooklyn) described the temporary patch as “impossible” to implement.
“There’s confusion here in our own state over how this is going to work. It’s going to be very difficult,” he told The Post. “Cuomo, at the end of the day, is going to have to make a decision based on what the president’s announced.”
A spokesman for Gov. Cuomo referred questions to the state Health Department, which did not return calls Saturday.
Insurers are also pessimistic.
“There are so many moving parts to this process. When you tamper with one, no matter how good your intention is, you have intended consequences and unintended consequences,” said Ben Nelson, chief executive of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
Washington, Vermont and Rhode Island — all of which are running their own state-based insurance exchanges — said they would not offer one-year extensions to existing policies as proposed by Obama.
His decision to allow a one-year extension on cancelled plans requires each state to examine whether it can do so under existing laws. That means figuring out how to resurrect canceled policies and whether to allow insurers to raise prices.
California, Oregon and Colorado have signaled that they will grant one-year extensions.
Several million Americans stand to lose their health insurance in 2014 despite Obama’s promise that people who liked their benefits could keep them under his law.
His broken pledge led to a vote Friday in the House of Representatives on a Republican bill to keep the existing policies. It was supported by 39 Democrats.
Whether it works or not, the pressure is on insurers to make it so by the end of December — before plans start to be canceled on Jan. 1.
“The president is essentially asking them to do in the next six weeks what normally takes a year to do, which is offer a policy and certify it for sale,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, President of the American Action Forum and a health economist. “They can do something, but I don’t think they are going to get a radical impact on the number of people with dropped policies.”