Health and Human Services Dept.: It’s not an ‘exchange,’ it’s a ‘marketplace’

Reacting to negative views and grassroots opposition to Obamacare — or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — the Health and Human Services Department has dropped all references to “exchanges” in favor of something that rings more of capitalism.

Press statements from HHS now refer to health insurance “marketplaces,” not exchanges, in each state.

As Georgetown University Health Policy Institute reported on Jan. 17: “This week, [HHS] began a major push to educate the public about the new health insurance options available … including the newly-named Health Insurance Marketplace, formerly known as the Federally Facilitated Exchange.”

Obamacare opponents are hardly impressed — or fooled.

FreedomWorks, a grassroots group with a mission to advance free market and limited government principles throughout the nation, operates a website dedicated entirely to halting the exchanges, www.blockexchanges.com.

Dean Clancy, the director of health-care policy for the group, said the name-change was indicative of desperation on the part of the administration to boost Obamacare favorability ratings.

“They could call them motherhood or apple pie, but it wouldn’t change our feelings about them,” Mr. Clancy said, in a Hill report. “We’re encouraged that they’re showing signs of desperation. I think that it’s too late in the game to try to start calling this something different.”

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