If you keep it can you like it?

Edward Lloyd's coffee house. Image via Rombouts.

Breaking from Wall Street Journal:

The White House on Thursday will announce a plan for allowing insurance companies to continue offering existing individual insurance policies even if they fall short of the coverage standards set by the 2010 health-care law, a Democratic official briefed on the plan said....

The plan, which the official said could be implemented without passing legislation, would allow insurance companies to extend "substandard'' plans in 2014 only if they are already in existence. Unlike the House bill, the administration plan wouldn't allow insurance companies to offer such plans to new customers.

The theory is first that this will stop the congressional Democrats from signing onto anything rash; it can be done without any legislation, and that sounds like a good thing. Of course I don't see how this will "work" in the sense of actually getting those misbegotten complainers their imaginary coverage back. The insurers don't want to offer the plans that they've canceled, at least unless they get a chance to make them worse, by adding new restrictions or increasing the deductible. But maybe they'll be permitted to do that. Or maybe they'll be sort of forced to offer plans that were grandfathered under the original legislation.

Meanwhile I have a proposal: the Multistate Plan Program should be enabled to create a plan for anybody whose policy has been canceled that would match the premiums.

The way it would work would be like this: You'd start out by calculating the effective premium on the basis of the customer's income and its position on the poverty scale. If then are at 400% of poverty their effective premium is the same as the premium they've been paying, if they earn less then their effective premium is whatever the actual premium would buy after the government subsidies under the Obamacare program proper. Then the coverage package would be the Ten Essential Benefits plus whatever disposition of coinsurance/deductible/out-of-pocket maximum makes sense—some wealthier customers might well end up paying 80% or 90% coinsurance, because those premiums they've been paying are just too low, but it would still be a better deal than what they got from the canceled plans. Those "if I like it I can keep it" folks would have to accept, because the freedom they're insisting on is the freedom to pay an excessively low premium and eat the associated risks.

Best of all, it would get the Multistate into business in a bigger way, hastening the day when it becomes our National Health. What do you think?