Houses Approves Canceled Health Insurance, View Vote Breakdown List

The House on Friday approved a bill to allow insurers to sell canceled health insurance plans that had been canceled due to ObamaCare regulations.

The vote came a day after President Obama announced he would unilaterally attempt to fix the problem, but Obama capitulated after the vote had been scheduled Tuesday.

The bill passed 261-157, with 39 Democrats crossing over to support the GOP-backed legislation (View for the vote breakdown below), who previously supported opposing the effort before and during the government shutdown. Only after Republicans’ predictions that the law would negatively harm Americans coming to fruition, did these Democrats make a politically calculated decision.

The bill approved by the Republican-controlled House would go further than the plan Obama by allowing insurance companies to sell the old plans to customers who previously had them, as well as new customers, but only for another year. Obama’s plan would only apply to those customers enrolled in the plans before the cancellation notices went out.

However, Republicans, in bringing the bill to the floor on Friday, underscored that President Obama does not even have the constitutional authority to make those changes on his own. President Obama previously and unilaterally exempted his crony friends from compliance with the law, which many on the right criticized before the shutdown.

House Speaker John Boehner said he’s “highly skeptical that they can do this administratively.”

The legislation’s sponsor, Michigan Republican and Chairman Fred Upton, also raised the question whether or not Obama could or would simply reverse course a few weeks or months down the road. Upton told Fox News that his bill is a “better answer — because who knows how his executive order is going to be tested?”

President Obama has already vowed to veto the House bill, despite claiming he wants to remedy his broken promise, disguising his opposition with suggestions the bill goes too far. Prior the vote, Republicans turned away a Democratic alternative that would have taken the teeth out of the GOP bill, because it wouldn’t have addressed the real cause of the problem nor its already devastating ramifications.

The bill may be a great gesture, but neither so-called “fix” will actually undo the damage ObamaCare has and will cause. In fact, both are likely to cause problems for the insurance industry and state-level commissioners, further exacerbating the negative impacts of an already-failed law.

Amid Obama’s announcement on Thursday, they complained that they were unsure how to implement the change, if at all, considering cancellation notices have already gone out and rates have already been set for 2014 in many states.

Obama plans to meet with insurance industry executives Friday afternoon, after they fired back at the Obama administration for trying to dump the blame on them.

“What we want to do is to be able to say to these folks, you know what, the Affordable Care Act is not going to be the reason why insurers have to cancel your plan,” Obama said of the millions who have received cancellation notices. But the fact, is that insurers are merely following the law, a law that is designed to throw off those private holders so that high risk pools do not drive up premiums even further.

Only last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a Senate panel she doubted that retroactively permitting insurers to sell canceled policies after all “can work very well since companies are now in the market with an array of new plans. Many have actually added consumer protections in the last 3 1/2 years.”