I received the following mass emailing from Jane Hamscher of Firedoglake. How bad is the current bill?
Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations — whether you want to or not.
If you refuse to buy the insurance, you’ll have to pay penalties of up to 2% of your annual income to the IRS
After being forced to pay thousands in premiums for junk insurance, you can still be on the hook for up to $11,900 a year in out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Massive restriction on a woman’s right to choose, designed to trigger a challenge to Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court.
Paid for by taxes on the middle class insurance plan you have right now through your employer, causing them to cut back benefits and increase co-pays.
Many of the taxes to pay for the bill start now, but most Americans won’t see any benefits — like an end to discrimination against those with preexisting conditions — until 2014 when the program begins.
Allows insurance companies to charge people who are older 300% more than others.
Grants monopolies to to drug companies that will keep generic versions of expensive biotech drugs from ever coming to market.
No reimportation of prescription drugs, which would save consumers $100 billion over 10 years.
The cost of medical care will continue to rise, and insurance premiums for a family of 4 will rise an average of $1000 a year — meaning in 10 years, you family’s insurance premium will be $10,000 more annually than it is right now.
I could go on, but it should be clear: this is not reform. This is a con job.
The most pressing alleged purposes of health care reform were A) to make health care universally available and B) to control skyrocketing costs of health care. I haven’t actually read the Senate bill, but Hamsher’s interpretation accords with various accounts of it that I have read. The current Senate bill does a tepid job of addressing expanding coverage. As far as controlling the costs of health care, it’s hard to see how it does anything at all.
Problem: 47 million uninsured.
Current health bill solution: force everyone to buy insurance.
Bingo, no more uninsured! Hey, who knew "solutions" were so easy? Next, I say we legislate the following:
-Global warming: CO2 shall no longer be considered a greenhouse gas.
-Peak Oil: Supply of cheap hydrocarbons shall be mandated to rise in lockstep with demand.
-Fiscal responsibility: Bankers shall no longer be driven solely by avarice.
-Too big to fail: failure shall be illegal. Mandatory fine for non-compliance.
Who knew fixing things could be so easy…
Brynn: You are spot on with your list of "solutions."
Considering that notable progressives have both endorsed (Al Franken, Paul Krugman) and denounced (Howard Dean, Markos Moulitsas) the health-care bill, I'm still having a very tough time making up my mind about it. But I wanted to comment on one thing:
"Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations — whether you want to or not."
This is phrased to make it sound outrageous, but I'd be interested to know: In the European countries that have government-administered health care systems that outperform ours, what percentage of people's income is spent in providing health services? Is it comparable to the 9% figure?
Who's complaining about requiring a measly 2% minimum for insurance? I'm paying 22% of my income for health insurance now. And that's because I recently renegotiated my premiums to pay less, via a $5,000 annual deductible and joining a "network". I have been paying 28% for the last few years.
Dan – I'm wondering whether that 2% is a misprint. For most people, it would be a joyous day to pay only 2% of one's annual salary to have health insurance.
Arianna Huffington on why we need to kill the bill:
"From start to finish, the insurance and drug industries — and their army of lobbyists — had control over the process that resulted in a bill that is reform in name only. The postmortems of how they pulled it off have already begun. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune published an exhaustive front-page analysis by Northwestern University's Medill News Service and the Center for Responsive Politics of how it was done. The main culprit: "a revolving door between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companies with a stake in health care legislation."
The study found that 13 former congressmen and 166 Congressional staffers were actively engaged in lobbying their former colleagues on the bill. The companies they were working for — some 338 of them — spent $635 million on lobbying. It was money extremely well spent — delivering a bill that, by forcing people to buy a shoddy product in a market with no real competition, enshrines into law the public subsidy of private profit."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/…
Dan, Erich-
Here's what I can find for details. The LA Times reports that the <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">penalty</span> for failure to buy insurance</span> is as much as 2.5% of income in the house bill, 2% in the senate bill. Both plans currently have subsidies for those earning up to 400% of the poverty level, and cap the amount that subsidized individuals would have to pay at either 9.8% (House) or 12% (Senate).
For those getting insurance through their employers, employees under the House plan must pay 72.5% of the premium, or 65% for families. In the Senate plan, employers must pay 60% of the premium, and the employee's portion must not exceed 9.8% of income or the employer faces penalties.
Apparently, a lot can still change when it comes to reconciliation.
I know this will sound more like appeasement than logic, but let's consider this politically. Kill this bill and it is unlikely another will be put forward for years. Momentum will be lost and because it will be perceived as a Democratic failure, Republicans can (possibly) make gains in the House and Senate and thereby guarantee no such bill comes up for the foreseeable future.
With a bill passed, we all seem to forget that legislation gets worked on for years or decades after passage. This will establish the precedent that sweeping legislation on the entire health care edifice can be passed and therefore future bills will have a better chance—at least will seem less divisive and controversial.
It is just possible that in this instance all that can reasonably (politically) be hoped for is the passage of a bill, any bill, that opens the floor to the idea that we *may* address this issue legislatively in the future. Going at it piecemeal over time to "fix" its shortcomings would seem viable only in the face of having gotten such a bill passed.
This flies in the face, of course, of idealism and the do-or-die perceived necessities of fixing things Right Now, but this is political reality, and I'm looking at this as possibly a minor miracle. Balking at it is as likely to destroy any possibility of a bill right now and give the idiots on the Right a shot at taking charge again.
Just my two cents.
Brynn: This is from Huffpo:
Obama made health care in general a major part of his campaign so that when he won, he could claim a mandate and push for reform during his first year. In doing so, Obama savaged his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, for arguing that people should be mandated to buy health insurance. "If a mandate was the solution, we could try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody buy a house," he said on a CNN morning show on Super Tuesday during the election.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/22/after-ri…
I'm continually amazed, although I shouldn't be by now, at the blatant lies, the complete, 180-degree reversals that take place from the campaign to office. This happens at all levels, and I'm at a loss for what can be done about it. It does remind me of a joke though…
Today's Washington Post:
See here for a a list of ways in which Obama did, in fact, campaign on a public option.
Also worth noting is <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/12/22/health_care/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+salon%2Fgreenwald+%28Glenn+Greenwald%29" rel="nofollow">Glenn Greenwald's piece yesterday in which he points out that stocks in major health-care/insurance companies have been on a winning streak:
Brynn: Glenn Greenwald is well-informed and devastating to the Obama spin-campaign. Save for the Daily Kos analysis on public option.
I don't recall anything in the house bill that would require individual households to buy insurance. As for penalties, the house reform bill that specifies penalties for companies like Wal-mart that offer health insurance to the employees that most of them can't afford, then assists them in signing up for medicare and medicaid.
I've just started to read the senate bill, and I am finding several provisions in it which seem to be written by the insurance companies.
The first item I found in the senate bill was a provision that allows premiums to be increased by a factor of up to 2 to 1 based on age. I haven't seen any details describing how premium increases are to be calculated, but I assume this provides an escape clause for the insurers by allowing them to increase premiums on elderly retirees who can't afford to remain insured, and would dump them on publicly funded programs .
In the house bill, there is a very restrictive public option for the low income employees that qualify to opt for enrollment in state medicaid waiver programs. However, the public option as originally envisioned would have allowed for essentially state operated non-profit health insurance is not in the house bill.
Stephen Colbert on "health care reform," as reported by Jason Linkins:
""Folks," Colbert continues, "There are some things that everybody knows, but nobody says." That is exactly right. Every single person who covers the legislative process knows exactly how and why the sausage gets made in the way it does. Moneyed corporate interests purchase legislation in exchange for getting incumbents re-elected. This is playing out in the arena of health care reform. If you've gotten the funny feeling that Congress is about to pass some weak tea, and that President Barack Obama is about to sign that weak tea, and that everyone will follow that up by celebrating the historical kicking of the can down the road — you are absolutely right. And the reason this will happen is that the health care industry has paid handsomely for this to happen. But, as Colbert points out, this is one of those things that nobody talks about because the media would rather tell you what political side is winning and which one is losing because it's way more fun than simply reporting, every day, that the American people are getting jacked."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/30/stephen-…
To visualize the corruption, take a look at these detailed tables and charts.