The House Democrats have posted a list of immediate “benefits” people will see from the health care bill:
- Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans;
- Provide immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition through a temporary high-risk pool;
- Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all individual plans;
- Lower seniors prescription drug prices by beginning to close the donut hole;
- Offer tax credits to small businesses to purchase coverage;
- Eliminate lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits in all plans;
- Require plans to cover an enrollee’s dependent children until age 26;
- Require new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;
- Ensure consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal new insurance plan decisions;
- Require premium rebates to enrollees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and require public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs.
Let me paraphrase:
- Make private coverage more expensive.
- Offer a government subsidy.
- Make private coverage more expensive.
- Make Medicare more expensive.
- Offer a government subsidy.
- Make private coverage more expensive.
- Make private coverage more expensive.
- Make private coverage more expensive.
- Nothing.
- Make private coverage more expensive.
A couple of these (the appeals process and the high-risk pools) might be good ideas if they’re well-implemented (which I doubt), but every single one of them increases costs. I mention this because they go on to say:
By enacting these provisions right away, and others over time, we will be able to lower costs for everyone and give all Americans and small businesses more control over their health care choices.
Amazing. They list ten items that increase costs, and then somehow claim they are lowering costs for everyone. Similarly, they say that they give Americans more control over their health care choices, but most of the items on their list foreclose choices. (You want to choose basic minimal coverage? Too bad.) In fact, all of them do, because cost is the greatest choice restrictor of all.
They really are completely out of touch with reality.
UPDATE: From what I’ve been reading (for example), the appeals process item really doesn’t do anything at all.
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