Following from my previous post about the Administration’s decision to exempt people from Obamacare whose policies were cancelled because of Obamacare because Obamacare was a hardship, Seth Chandler has this post, titled “Obama administration shocking decision to drop individual mandate — but only for some.”

First, Seth asks what authority HHS has to change the definition of “hardship” on the fly.

I look forward to hearing from others, and in particular from people with a commitment to the rule of law who previously have supported the ideas behind the ACA, but it is not clear to me that any of the pre-existing bases contained in this regulation for claiming a hardship exemption would apply to having a predicted cancellation in one’s individual insurance policy. Maybe at this late hour there are arguments and other documents I am not considering. Surely, however, the existence of the ACA itself can not be the human-caused event creating the hardship. Moreover, I have trouble seeing how the cancellation of a plan makes it more difficult for these individuals — as opposed to others in similar circumstances — from obtaining coverage under a qualified health plan.  I can well imagine cynics saying that the only real hardship involved here is having believed President Obama when he said that if you liked your health plan you could keep it and thus not having saved up for the higher prices that often exist in policies with “Essential Health Benefits.” Of course, if , as the Obama administration has claimed, many of these cancelled policies were junk that the policyholder should be glad to be rid of, it becomes yet more challenging to see much of a hardship at all in being offered real insurance coverage with all of its greater benefits.

In any event, it does not take a fertile imagination to foresee legal challenges to this limited exemption from those not fortunate enough to have had health insurance in the past but who are not being given a similar exemption from the individual mandate. I can easily see challenges based on failures of administrative procedure and equal protection.

Second, Seth offers some preliminary thoughts on the impact of this change on a death spiral:

I and others will need to think hard about the issue of magnitude. Obama administration officials are reported as having stated at a briefing that all but 500,000 of those with canceled policies will be enrolling in policies under the Exchange. This claim, however, is impossible to reconcile with existing enrollment statistics and assertions that millions of individuals have had their individual policies cancelled.  It is difficult to see how this decision would not exacerbate at least somewhat the risk of an adverse selection death spiral overtaking the Exchanges in many states.  The tax created by the mandate has always been justified as necessary to induce people of low or moderate risk to join those of higher risk in purchasing policies on the Exchange. By now exempting perhaps millions of people from this requirement — and, in particular, people who are most likely to have satisfied medical underwriting in the recent past — the Obama administration decision will likely diminish enrollment, at least somewhat, in the insurance Exchanges and, correlatively increase price pressures and insurer losses during 2014. To the extent that insurers systematically lose money as a result of this apparent decision, the federal government will be spending millions more — perhaps hundreds of millions more — in payments under the Risk Corridors program.

Stay tuned. The insurance industry is not happy about this.