Heath Care Reform, or Guaranteed Customers to the Insurance Industry?
To read the assemblage of media stories on the health care bill that the Senate is working on, you’d have thought that there was some there, there. On the one hand you have Howard Dean saying “the protectionist legislation for the insurance companies that is in there now needs to be stripped out entirely.” Meanwhile the lefty blogsphere is upset that Senator Joe Lieberman opposed the expansion of medicare. So what exactly is this bill that has Democrats fumbling through Red Bull in hopes of passing, something, anything, before Christmas?
The bill alledgedly does the following:
- Insurance comapnies will be required to spend a lesser pecentage on administrative costs and profits.
- Insureres have to participate in exchanges, and if they jack up rates before the exchanges start they won’t get to be in them.
- No child will be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions.
- By 2014 no caps on annual treatments.
- Patients will have right to an internal (read insurance company) appeakl and an external appeal.
- Consumers can pick out of state inusrance providors.
- Consumers have to buy health insurance.
- And some other boring stuff.
You can read the Salon rundown here. Everyone else is delving into the sausage making of who supports what. And somehow abortion becomes a flashpoint on who signs on and who doesn’t. Moveon.org is generating a petition against the Senate bill, Olympia Snowe isn’t supporting, but now Lieberman is. Kinda confusing isn’t it.
What the bill isn’t is health care reform. For that you’d have to actually have stuff in that relates to health care, not insurance. Things like, how much does procedure XYZ cost? Shouldn’t it cost the same for someone who has insurance as for someone who doesn’t? Forget the big traumatic life threatening things. What about my favorite example, the broken arm. Shouldn’t any patient anywhere know is adavance what it will cost if they go to a clinic, hosiptial, private practitioner, etc.? Does anyone in Congress care?
Apparently not, because all this bill does is add a layer of bureaucracy on top of a system predicated on keeping the consumer in teh dark about true health care costs, tied to employer provided benefits for jobs that every company is desperate to ship over seas to a labor market where there is nationalized healthcare. Hey and don’t you feel good that Nebraska will pick up $100 million to fund its medicare program? Not yet? How about Louisiana getting $300 million for its medicare tab? A reminder on which states are donor states and which states receive donor states tax dollars:
President Obama says “the American people will have the vote they deserve on health reform.” Oh yeah, it kinda sucks doesn’t it no matter which side of the of the health care reform aisle you are on. The vote we deserve? Kinda like the vote we had on TARP. The vote we had on cash for clunkers and the vote we had on bailouts in general.
