They’re not stu­pid, you know. They have found ways to avoid risk and make prof­its for a long time. Still can, appar­ent­ly. Car­ri­er crit­ics are now up in arms (belat­ed­ly) about the new prac­tices that are bur­den­ing those who are try­ing to take advan­tage of what Pres­i­dent Oba­ma promised. Over 300 patient advo­ca­cy groups recent­ly wrote the new HHS Sec­re­tary with their con­cerns say­ing that the insur­er prac­tices “are high­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry against patients with chron­ic health con­di­tions and may…violate the (law’s) nondis­crim­i­na­tion pro­vi­sions” Well, not exact­ly. Cre­ate a large bill and expect a lot of space with­in which to find loop­holes, of which they took advan­tage. Among their con­cerns are dif­fi­cul­ties con­sumers face in try­ing to get a full pic­ture of the plans avail­able on the exchange (true in part, but they dis­count the val­ue of agents in help­ing peo­ple find what they need), nar­row­ing of net­works (also required because of the demands of states such as Cal­i­for­nia to con­trol costs), and cut­backs in what are con­sid­ered to be pre­ferred drugs which must be list­ed to be cov­ered (no pro­hi­bi­tion against that, so car­ri­ers “took a shot”) as well as con­vert­ing some to co-insur­ance rather than using co-payments.