If you like your Obamacare plan, you can’t keep your Obamacare plan

President Obama’s oft-repeated statement that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” turned out to be a lie. In reality, you can keep your pre-Obamacare plan only if the government likes it.

But one might at least have hoped that if you like the Obamacare plan you select, you can keep it. Unfortunately, as Patrick Paule of InsureBlog explains, this isn’t necessarily the case:

The reason is that the new figures set forth in 2015 increase the maximum deductible from $2000 to $2150 and the out of pocket limit from $6350 to $6850.

Paule points out that, as a result of the change in these values, the actuarial value of plans (the AV) will change. And Obamacare establishes strict AV requirements. Insurance companies cannot sell plans that don’t meet these requirements.

Plugging the 2015 deductible and out pocket limits into a typical insurance plan, Paule finds that the plan, though AV compliant in 2014, will be non-compliant in 2015. As such, consumers will not be able to keep it.

When Obama’s initial promise about keeping one’s health care was exposed as a lie, he argued that the plans folks would be unable to keep are junk plans. What will he say to people who can’t keep their Obamacare plans?

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