Again, Obamacare can't promise an insurance company will keep your doctor in its network any more than he can promise that your local grocery store will keep stocking Caffeine Free Mountain Dew even though you're the only one who likes it. In fact, if Obama did try to compel insurance companies to hold on to your doctors the right wingers would be rolling around in the streets shrieking about socialism, and they might even have a point.
All Obama's "promise" means that Obamacare will not compel any insurance company to drop a doctor, and it doesn't. If an insurance company decides to do what's in its own best interest (and the interests of its customers, if that's to drop expensive doctors and lower people's premiums), that's the decision of the company, not of Obama.
Anyway, everyone knows this. The Right is just fauxraging and concern trolling over this non-issue.
The point is that the interests of the insurance companies and of doctors change due to the ACA and the regulations of the Obama administration. Something that made financial sense for them to offer before nor longer does.
Obamacare could have been put in place in its entirety without touching Medicare Advantage. The health insurance market for seniors is separate from that affected by Obamacare.
The only reason Medicare Advantage was cut was to reduce the deficit and make Obamacare revenue-neutral or revenue-positive. This was never a consideration for Medicare Part D when Republicans were in power, but it was a requirement the Dems took upon themselves as a matter of fiscal responsibility.
Shua, in criticizing Obama for ending Medicare Advantage, you are advocating for deficits and wasteful spending in order to score gotcha points on a related but independent policy. You are welcome to do so, but I would question what you stand for, strategically, if your focus is on tactics. Do you support higher deficits and wasteful subsidies? If not, why are you happy for this?
