FOX has questions on health care reform; Congressman Anthony Weiner has clear answers
Congressman Anthony Weiner fields health care reform questions from FOX's panel of right-wingers:
This is not real health care reform
Howard Dean on what pretends to be "health care reform":
Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these. Real health-care reform is supposed to eliminate discrimination based on preexisting conditions. But the legislation allows insurance companies to charge older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans, pricing them out of coverage. The bill was supposed to give Americans choices about what kind of system they wanted to enroll in. Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company, which may take up to 30 percent of your premium dollars and spend it on CEO salaries -- in the range of $20 million a year -- and on return on equity for the company's shareholders. Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which time premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.I entirely agree with Dean. I would like to tear up the current proposals and start over. I'd do it in two steps. First, quickly pass a bill with all of the low-hanging fruit, to get them out of the way: for example, requiring portability and prohibiting rejection of new customers based on pre-existing conditions. Only then, proceed with the brunt of the program. Let the expensive part of the program live or die on its own merits. Undistracted by the low-hanging fruit, we can better evaluate how much the new program would cost and what the tax-payers would get for their money.
Cap the profits of health care insurers.
Former CIGNA executive Wendell Potter reports that in the early 1990s health insurance companies devoted more than 95% of every premium dollar to paying doctors and hospitals to reimburse them for health care provided to insurers. Things have changed:
Today, insurers only pay about 81 cents of each premium dollar on actual medical care. The rest is consumed by rising profits, grotesque executive salaries, huge administrative expenses, the cost of weeding out people with pre-existing conditions and claims review designed to wear out patients with denials and disapprovals of the care they need the most.They keep profits high by creatively denying claims, canceling individual policies when insureds get sick, kicking unprofitable insureds out of the insurance pool, and issuing confusing benefit statements to insureds. Potter, with the support of Senator Al Franken, makes the case that Congress should pass legislation requiring health insurers to pay at least 90% of the premiums for real health care. According to Potter, the difference between 81% and 95% is $112 billion a year, which would amount to a significant reduction in premiums or a significant improvement in coverage. Wendell Potter is a voice we can trust when it comes to health care reform. A few months ago, I posted regarding his lengthy interview with Bill Moyers. See, also, Potter's recent interview at MSNBC, indicating that the health care industry owns the U.S. Senate. Potter makes clear that there is no reform taking place with current "reform" legislation.
Tear up the health care bill and start over.
I wrote a comment on this same issue last night, but I wanted to make it into a post as well, given the importance. Marcia Angel, M.D., former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, is highly critical of the proposed "health care reform." Although she admits that it accomplishes a few things, it is worse than doing nothing.
It throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it.
Read the full post at Huffpo for Angel's clear and understandable ideas for meaningful (and not corrupt) health care reform. I agree with Angel that the current bill is an industry-coddling joke and that it is worse than doing nothing, for the reasons she offers. The House bill has a few pieces of low hanging fruit (e.g., portability), but at great unnecessary expense and waste. We need to tear up this celebrated new bill (celebrated by the Democrats, anyway) and start over. For more on Angell's ideas for reform, also see her recent appearance on Bill Moyer's show.Time to go read the House version of the health care reform bill.
It would be irresponsible to take a position on the new House version of the health care bill without reading it, right? Despite the importance and expense of the bill, many national news websites don't even contain a link to the actual words of the bill. Therefore, go to this link and read the full text of the bill. It's almost 2,000 pages long and it's loaded with specialized terminology and ambiguities. To read it, you'll need to give up many hours of your life. I'm a lawyer, and I read difficult documents all day at work. I can guarantee that it would take me more than a week to read this bill and to obtain a thorough understanding of its main provisions. How many Americans would be willing to read this bill without being required to read it as part of a special healthcare-related job (much less understand it) prior to taking a position on it? Probably only a handful. Out of almost 300,000,000 Americas, only a few would exert the effort to read the entire thing. In fact, send in a comment if you are not being paid to read this bill, and you've nonetheless read it on your own just to be an informed citizen. This House bill will eventually need to be reconciled with a Senate bill, which will be comparable in length and complexity. Completely responsible people will read both versions and map out the differences. That could take many weeks, even for those of us who are even able to analyze text at this level. To really follow this legislation in real time would require one to give up everything he or she cares about for many weeks. It means giving up time with one's family, exercising, entertainment and probably burning vacation time at work. I doubt that it is a rare legislator has read more than 1/4 of this bill. What does it mean when it takes 2,000 words to put an idea into a law containing numerous vague provisions? I have become cynical about this process (as you can probably tell). My presumption is that this bill is representative of many modern pieces of federal legislation (there are many other similarly long and vague federal laws that have been passed over the past couple of decades). My suspicion is that when a bill is written in lengthy prose that is often vague, it means that it is intentionally written this way to discourage ordinary people from understanding it. It is written with lots of bells and whistles that will work to the benefit of private businesses. It is written for those who can afford to hire teams of lawyers who can "work" the law to their advantage in federal courts. Something for everyone who can afford to litigate, it seems, based on the many provisions. Or would it be more accurate to say that this bill is an attempt to put off for another day the dirty details of who, exactly will be covered, whether those who are being insured by the federal government get the same gold-plated coverage as those who work hard to shell out $1,000/month to insure their families, how much it will really cost to give this kind of coverage to the poor and working poor, who will pay for it in the end and what will we no longer be able to afford as a country given that we are going to be paying a presumably huge sum for health care? These are the kinds of questions that good and decent people want to know before they make a commitment. I should make it clear that the current system is terrible in many ways, both for people who are insured and those who aren't. We need a new law to keep purchasers of health insurance from getting ripped off by insurers, but this is low-hanging fruit that could be knocked out with a 10-page bill. We also need to figure out some affordable level of coverage to provide to those who we feel moral compulsions to cover. I suspect that all of this could be done in far less than 2,000 pages. Like I mentioned, I'm suspicious about this process, which has proven to be opaque in more ways than one. Seeing this bill makes me realize how daunting it is for most folks to "get involved" in the government process. No wonder so many people, driven by emotions, give up entirely and insist that living locally can take care of national or global problems. These include many of the "free market fundamentalists," as well as many others who haven't quite articulated why they are so reluctant to get involved.