House Approves Bill That Allows Policy Renewals

The vote was 261 to 157, with 39 Democrats bucking their party leadership and the White House to vote in favor of the bill. Hours after the vote, Mr. Obama and top aides met for over an hour with insurance executives  after industry leaders complained Thursday that they had been blindsided by a White House reversal on canceled policies. The president described the meeting as a “brainstorming” session about how to ensure changes to the health care law go smoothly.

The insurance representatives, from more than a dozen companies, said they would work with the administration to protect the financial viability of the new marketplaces, but did not say how. Afterward, Karen Ignagni, the president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, said it was a “very productive” meeting, but would not go into detail.

The legislation approved by the House would go further than the fix announced on Thursday by Mr. Obama, who said he would temporarily waive some requirements of the law and allow insurers to renew “current policies for current enrollees” for a year.

Many of the Democrats who supported the bill are facing tough re-election fights back home, and expressed deep frustration with how the administration had handled the early carrying out of Mr. Obama’s signature health care law. Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia, who voted for the legislation, said that the White House deserved an “F-minus” for its botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

“I’m disgusted about it,” Mr. Rahall said. “I think heads should roll downtown. Whoever was responsible or may have known that this was going to occur should no longer be employed.”

Representative Ron Barber, Democrat of Arizona, who also joined Republicans in voting for the bill, was equally scathing, calling the rollout “a disaster.”

“My constituents are pretty upset,” he said, “and so am I.”

Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan and the chief sponsor of the House bill, said it would fulfill a promise that Mr. Obama had made to the American people and then broken.

“In the last three years,” Mr. Upton said, “the president personally promised that if people liked their current health care plan, they could keep it ‘no matter what.’ But cancellation notices are now arriving in millions of mailboxes across the country. It’s cancellation today, sticker shock tomorrow.”

Mr. Upton, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, belittled Mr. Obama’s proposal, saying it was offered at the last minute, “as the administration’s allies in Congress panicked.”

Senior Democrats criticized the Upton legislation as a ploy that could unravel the entire health care law.

“Don’t pretend you care about the American people’s health care here,” said Representative Mike Doyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania. “You just want to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Democrats are not going to let you do that.”

And Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, said insurers, in discussing the bill, had had “significant concerns on how it would work operationally.”

The outlook for the legislation is unclear in the Senate, where Democrats running for re-election in 2014 are looking for a way to help consumers facing the loss of insurance policies that do not meet requirements of the 2010 law.

Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, was one of the first Democrats to break with the White House and offer her own proposal, which would allow people to keep their current plans indefinitely.

However, after the president’s turnabout on Thursday, many Senate Democrats said they were waiting to see if additional legislation was necessary, and quick action in the Senate is not expected.

House Democrats on Friday used a procedural maneuver to offer a plan of their own called “Landrieu lite.” It was similar to the president’s proposal in its approach, and it gave Democrats some political cover in that it showed them taking action on the issue. 

The Democratic proposal, which was rejected by Republicans, would have allowed people who like their current plans to retain them for a year. Under the Democratic proposal, unlike with Mr. Upton’s bill, insurers would not be allowed to sell plans that previously faced cancellation to new customers.

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, said insurers should be allowed to sell new policies like those now in force because it was extremely difficult for consumers to obtain coverage through the federal website, HealthCare.gov.

But Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Mr. Upton’s bill was an attempt to “drag us back to the bad old days of the American health care system.”

It would, he said, allow insurers to sell “cut-rate shoddy policies that lack the consumer protections of the Affordable Care Act.”

The House vote came as Mr. Obama struggles to extricate himself from a political crisis of his own making. Opinion polls indicate that he is losing the trust of many Americans because of his handling of the health law rollout and the debut of the insurance website, which has been paralyzed by technological failures.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said the Upton bill would provide relief to some people hurt by the president’s health care overhaul.

“The American people have grown weary of this administration spending money that it does not have on programs the American people do not want,” she said. “The president’s health care law is a great example.”

The White House said Mr. Obama would veto the House bill if it got to him. The bill, the administration said, would reverse progress made in extending coverage to the uninsured.

The House bill says that if an insurer was providing coverage in the individual market on Jan. 1 of this year, it “may continue” to offer such coverage for sale next year in the market outside the new insurance exchanges.

People who choose to buy or renew these policies in 2014 would be deemed to be in compliance with the requirement to have insurance, so they would not be subject to tax penalties for violating the individual mandate.

Insurance executives say that the premiums in the new federal and state marketplaces were based on the assumption that younger and generally healthy people who had been enrolled in cheaper plans would move into the new marketplaces. Their presence would help keep prices lower for everyone.

If those healthier people stick with their current plans, insurers say, then the new marketplaces could be filled with older, sicker people, and premiums could rise.