>>But I can say that the Washington Post, Politifact, USA Today, WSJ, Barney Frank (a Democrat), and a large number of American voters concluded that he lied. If you're right, that means an awful lot of "towers of silliness". :)

Re keeping your plan, here's some interesting discussion: note that the grandfathered end date now is pushed out to 2017 unless your state refuses to allow that:.

http://obamacarefacts.com/grandfathered-plans/

If the insurer significantly changes the plan you liked and wanted to keep- which is entirely their own decision and is not in any way mandated by the ACA- then the plan loses grandfathered status but still can keep going as long as it provides mandatory benefits. The common breaches involve:

1. Plan can't deny cover or treatment for preexisting conditions.

2. Lifetime limits are banned and annual limits must exceed $2M- apart from 10 essential Health Benefits that can't have annual limits.

3. You can’t be dropped except for fraud and even then you are entitled to a timely internal or external appeal.

4. You can no longer be charged more for being a woman or other gender or health issues.

5. You get full coverage of preventive care and well patient visits.

The big one IMHO: if a plan is non-compliant, the insurer has to tell the policyholder exactly why and also advise of other options available, including via the exchange. IMHO it's preferable for an insurer to make changes to trigger loss of grandfather status and then blame Obamacare as they move policyholders to another plan (as appears to have happened to Ted Cruz recently) than to have to tell policyholders they're paying for a lousy plan with better/cheaper plans almost certainly available elsewhere. And if there is a plan somewhere whose policyholders *want* lousy cover- then you can keep it as long as the insurer doesn't try to change those benefits you hold so dear.

Not wanting to write an essay- but prior to the ACA, around 40% of insured switched plans every year. For this and other reasons, HHS had estimated that 40-67% of individual policies would lose grandfathered status by 2011 and around 66% of large employer plans and as much as 80% of smaller employer plans by 2013. So the 2014 end date probably looked OK. Then real life including a disastrous website did its thing and the date got extended. Why? Seems to me projections were optimistic so people provided extensions to give people time to engage the new better coverage requirements. That's not what liars do. It's what reasonable people do to try to resolve an error. So if you want to label somebody a liar, maybe try Cruz for claiming Obamacare cost him his coverage.