AP reports:
It was a bold response to skyrocketing health insurance premiums. President Barack Obama would give federal authorities the power to block unreasonable rate hikes.
Yet when Democrats unveiled the final, incarnation of their health care bill this week, the proposal was nowhere to be found.
Ditto with several Republican ideas that Obama had said he wanted to include after a televised bipartisan summit last month, including a plan by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to send investigators disguised as patients to hospitals in search of waste, fraud and abuse.
And those “special deals” that Obama railed against and said he wanted to eliminate? With the exception of two of the most notorious — extra Medicaid money for Nebraska and a carve-out for Florida seniors faced with losing certain extra Medicare benefits — they are all still there.
For the White House, these were the latest unfulfilled commitments related to Obama’s health care proposal, starting with his campaign promise to let C-SPAN cameras film negotiations over the bill.
We can be thankful that the price controls were abandoned. As for the rest, well, who really believed him anyway?
UPDATE: To be clear, although the overt price caps may be out, the bill still does bar insurers from setting actuarially fair prices. Specifically, insurers are prohibited from considering most risk factors in setting their prices. Thus, costs are pushed down for high-risk clients and pushed up for low-risk clients.
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