Kansas: Politifact confirms what I said 10 days ago: Pat Roberts is full of hooey

Me, October 1st:

Kansas: Shocker: Pat Roberts lying about number of policies cancelled

In Kansas, yes, insurance companies were allowed to bump out non-compliant plans by at least a year...and indeed, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas ended up not cancelling "between 9,500 - 10,000" of their policy holders after all.

So...that basically wipes out half of the "20K cancelled" claim already.

...Supposedly Aetna/Coventry and some smaller providers may have originally been planning on cancelling a bunch of plans as well...except that according to this article, Coventry never got around to doing so in the first place...

...That pretty much leaves BCBS KC and the other 10K. Based on the evidence at hand, my guess is that they likely reversed their cancellation decision as well...and if they did, that means that the actual number of Kansans who lost their healthcare policy in 2013 due to ACA noncompliance may have actually been as little as...ZERO.

Politifact, Today:

Roberts said, "20,000 Kansans lost their health insurance because of (Obamacare)."

There’s no official information to corroborate Roberts’ claim. Several thousand Kansans received notices that their insurance plans could not be renewed because they did not comply with Obamacare standards, but the notices were retracted about a month later. Meanwhile, about 57,000 Kansans obtained insurance on HealthCare.gov. If the state follows the national trend, roughly half of these people were uninsured before the law.

We rate Roberts’ claim False.

I should also note that according to the health policy adviser for the Kansas Insurance Department, all of the policies originally scheduled to be "cancelled" due to ACA noncompliance were instead extended all the way out until 2016...

Then in March of this year, Kansas agreed to another transitional policy that allowed all of these policies to continue through 2016.

...which means that I was 100% correct: the number of policies cancelled "due to Obamacare" last year is indeed ZERO...and furthermore, the number cancelled in Kansas this year will be zero, as well as next year.

By the time they are cancelled, there will likely be very few people still even using those policies due to the massive churn rate of people moving onto & off of various insurance policies year to year for other reasons.