Transcript: White House background briefing on plan to allow insurers to continue offering canceled plans OPERATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the White House conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time. Should you require assistance during this call, you may press start and then zero, and an operator will assist you offline. At this time, I will turn the conference call over to your host with the White House, Ms. Tara McGuinness. Please go ahead. MCGUINNESS: Thank you very much. I appreciate everyone joining us this morning on this call. Later this morning, the president will make a statement on the health care law, but we wanted to give you a preview of some of the -- some of what he will announce. But before we start, I would like to do just a few elements of housekeeping. First, the terms of this call. This call is on background, embargoed until the president's speaks. You can use the information from officials on our call as "senior White House officials," but cannot cite their names or titles directly. And I'd ask that everyone keep this embargo until the president speaks. That goes for any -- any of the information offered or material. Finally, we do want to let you know, even though you -- we're asking you not to cite their names or titles directly, who you'll be hearing from this morning. I'm joined by (inaudible) and (inaudible). Again, I want to remind you all that this is on background and embargoed until the president speaks. We'll start the call right now with some brief remarks. I'm going to turn it over to (inaudible), and as we wrap up, we'll talk more about Q&A in a few moments. Thank you very much. Let me begin by saying that last week the president directed his team to come up with a fix to address the confusion and the challenges that have come across based upon some of the cancellation letters that people throughout the country had been receiving from insurance companies. Later today, the president at 11:45 is announcing an administrative fix that essentially says the following, that the Affordable Care Act for purposes of this year will not require insurance companies to upgrade their plans for individuals who have been in these existing plans so far. So, in other words, we're announcing that insurers can offer consumers the option to renew their 2013 health plans in 2014 without change, allowing these individuals to keep their plans. Essentially, this is an extension of the grandfathering principle both to people whose plans have changed since the law took effect and to people who purchased individual plans since the law took effect.