RIGHT SPEAK: Canceled Health Insurance Policies could be a Big Factor in the 2014 Senate Races...

...Especialy those races where it could go either way:

President Barack Obama announced Thursday he would let insurance companies restore their canceled health insurance plans for a year, even if the plans don’t meet the ACA’s minimum coverage requirements. Mr. Obama reacted in part because he had repeatedly promised consumers, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Thursday’s announcement may have been a policy fix for the ACA, but a look at the numbers suggests the president, and Democrats in general, also have an eye toward 2014. Most of the cancellations affect consumers who buy insurance directly from providers rather than obtaining coverage from an employer. There are a lot of them — about 30 million — and they make up big portions of the population in key states with Senate races in 2014.

The Democrats currently hold control of the Senate by five seats, 55-45, and they have a lot of seats on the election docket next year: 21. According to ratings from election analyst Charlie Cook, they face competitive races in nine of those elections. And in eight of those competitive races, 8% or more of the population falls into that individual insurance market, with hundreds of thousands falling into that group.

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Those numbers come from the Census Current Population Survey and they count all those covered by a private insurance plan purchased directly – men, women and children. So they aren’t all voters. And the numbers above aren’t meant to suggest that all those self-insured people will lose coverage or even that all those that lose coverage will automatically vote against Democrats due to that fact.

But if those races wind up being as tight as the forecasts, disaffected voters who buy their own insurance coverage could wind up being a crucial voting bloc.

There are bound to be tens of thousands of people in those states that received cancellation notices from their insurance companies or that end up having to buy new, more comprehensive and more expensive policies. That could work strongly against Democrats in those states.