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The brief, bizarre and tentative friendship between President Obama and the health insurance industry is so over, thanks to the president's plan to allow insurers to keep offering plans they've already cancelled. As one anonymous source put it:
Dem source: "World War III just broke out between WH and insurance industry." #deathspiral
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) November 14, 2013
On Thursday morning Obama announced that he would allow a one-year grace period for insurers to offer Americans to keep their non-Obamacare-compliant plans through 2014. So if insurers won't, or can't, keep those plans on the market, then it's not the president's fault.
(Update: And now some state regulators are siding with the insurance industry. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which is made up of the chief insurance regulators from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, also issued a statement written by its president, Louisiana's Republican insurance regulator Jim Donelon, who argued that "this decision continues different rules for different policies and threatens to undermine the new market." The president's plan gives state regulators the power to approve or deny the extension of plans in their state, making them susceptible to blame as well.)