Capital Region representatives divided on Obamacare fix

A bill that would allow people to keep health plans that won't be offered in the future passed the U.S. House of Representatives today with support from two local representatives and opposition from one.

The Keep Your Health Plan Act  would allow plans currently offered to be extended into 2014 and beyond. If enacted, it would potentially allow more than 3.5 million people, whose plans will be cancelled, to continue to receive their current coverage. 

U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko, D-Amsterdam, was the lone local no vote on the Republican sponsored idea, which was advanced as the result of the latest backlash against Obamacare. The latest uproar is over the death of some health insurance plans that don't meet the basic coverage requirements in Obamacare.

There ended up being 157 no votes, while the 261 yes votes took the day. One of the more than three dozen Democratic yes votes was U.S. Rep. Bill Owens, D-Plattsburgh.

U.S. Rep. Chris Gibson, R-Kinderhook, joined his side of the aisle in supporting the bill too. “As I’ve said all along, the Affordable Care Act, which had the right goals of lowering health care costs and increasing access to quality care, would never deliver on these promises," he said in a statement.

"One of these tenets was that my constituents, and Americans across the country, would be able to keep their current health insurance if they liked it," Gibson said. "That has turned out to be a false promise, and today’s legislation would fix that – allowing insurance companies to continue to offer current plans."

President Barack Obama recently said that people who like their current plans, even if they were supposed to be cancelled, can stay on them for another year. Gibson argued that despite this promise, the president isn't in a position to make this promise. 

And while Gibson would prefer to scrap Obamacare, he said, "In the absence of that, we should at a minimum ensure the law is not forced on Americans with a broken website, unfair applicability, and direct promises that are not being kept."

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