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11/16/13, "D.C. insurance commissioner fired a day after questioning Obamacare fix" Washington Post, Aaron C.Davis
"A day after he questioned President Obama’s decision to unwind a major tenet of the health-care law and said the nation’s capital might not go along, D.C. insurance commissioner William P. White was fired.
White was called into a meeting Friday afternoon with one of
Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s (D) top deputies and told that the mayor “wants
to go in a different direction,” White told The Washington Post on
Saturday.
White said the mayoral deputy never said that he was being asked to
leave because of his Thursday statement on health care. But he said the
timing was hard to ignore. Roughly 24 hours later, White said, he was
“basically being told, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”
White was one of the first insurance commissioners in the nation last week to push back against
Obama’s attempt to smooth over part of the botched rollout of the
Affordable Care Act: millions of unexpected cancellations of insurance
plans.
In persuading Congress to vote for the health-care
overhaul, Obama had promised that Americans who liked their insurance
plans would be able to keep them. When that turned out to not be the
case, Obama apologized last week. And to stem growing bipartisan
dissent, he announced Thursday that plans slated to be canceled next
year to comply with the legislation could be extended for one year.
While
the president’s plan sounded like a simple fix, it rattled the
insurance industry, which had set prices for next year based on many of
its products changing to comply with the health-care law.
Allowing some
plans to continue beyond Jan. 1 could also run afoul of provisions in
laws passed by dozens of states and the District to implement the
Affordable Care Act.
In a statement issued Thursday, White hinted strongly that he opposed the idea.
“The
action today undercuts the purpose of the exchanges, including the
District’s DC Health Link, by creating exceptions that make it more
difficult for them to operate,” the statement said.
He also
pointed to a statement issued by the National Association of Insurance
Commissioners that said the Obama order “threatens to undermine the new
market, and may lead to higher premiums and market disruptions in 2014
and beyond.”
“We concur with that assessment,” White said Thursday.
White’s
statement was removed from the department’s Web site sometime before
Friday morning. Asked about the removal Friday, spokesman Michael Flagg
said the department’s statement had changed.
“Our statement now is
that we’re taking a close look at the implications of the president’s
announcement on the District’s exchange and we will soon recommend a
course of action after taking into consideration the positions of all
the stakeholders,” Flagg wrote in an e-mail.
On Saturday, Flagg
declined to comment on whether White had been fired, saying the
department doesn’t comment on personnel issues.
A senior city
official said White’s initial statement was sent to the mayoral
communications director, Pedro Ribeiro, only minutes before it was
issued publicly. It was not sent to Deputy Mayor Victor Hoskins, White’s
immediate supervisor, said the official, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about a personnel
matter.
A formal statement critical of the president should have
been closely vetted and approved by the mayor’s office, and White
refused to acknowledge the misstep, the official said. White said
Hoskins fired him Friday.
White said he thought he would have been
derelict in his duties to not quickly make a statement on the
president’s announcement.
“Everyone was looking for responses
from the regulators. One of my chief concerns is always consistency and
clarity in the marketplace — you can’t have something that big sitting
out there without responding to it,” he said.
White had served as
Gray’s commissioner for the D.C. Department of Insurance, Securities
and Banking since February 2011. Prior to last week, his most
high-profile and controversial role had been as chief of the department
that took control of Chartered Health Plan, the city’s largest manager
of health care for low-income residents, amid questions about
“irregularities” in its finances.
Chartered was owned by businessman Jeffrey E. Thompson,
who has been implicated in funding a $650,000 “shadow campaign” to
elect Gray. White oversaw the successful sale of the insurer’s assets,
and his department’s handling of the transition has been generally
viewed positively.
White said he had known since he took the job
that he served at the pleasure of the mayor. He said he was proud of his
record and would have stayed.
On the president’s proposed
health-care fix, he said: “I wasn’t saying I was against it, I also was
saying I didn’t know enough to fully support it — I want to be clear,
and I think it is, I was not speaking for Mayor Gray.”" via Free Rep.
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Comment: Obviously the DC Insurance Commissioner was racist.
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