- Jun 6, 2007
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An abundance of Americans are furious with the Republican Party for passing the Republican House Healthcare bill through the House this past week because this bill essentially blows up America's current health care system a couple of the most noteworthy provisions are that it pulls the rug out from under many low and middle income American families by repealing the ACA federal subsidy program for health insurance and replacing it with a tax credit program not linked to the cost of a good health insurance program and it changes the community pricing mandate in America's individual health insurance market in a manner that will significantly increase the cost of health insurance plans for older Americans. This writer is in this camp not only for the aforementioned reasons but also because the House Republicans in doing what they have done have thrown away the American people's chance to fix the ACA for at least two years a fix the American people desperately need and which is definitely achievable; the Republican party has no good defense to their actions here the American people saw this bill back in March when it was first scheduled for a vote and clearly rejected it and the bill since then has just gotten worse from a policy perspective. Any fix to the ACA had to take place this year because the good fix that this law needs requires elected representatives to make a giant step out from their party's positions doing so because the other side is doing the same thing and these officials will find it too hard too politically risky to do it next year when the election season is upon America. Any competent analysis recognizes that at the earliest this bill gets out of the conference committee it will be September so that if it fails Congress would only have three months to try to pass a bill which would be a bi-partisan fix not enough time; the centrist Republicans and Democrats that would champion such a bill will insist on a credible legislative process where the respective committees create an outline of a bill if not an actual bill containing the actual policies that make up the bill and Congress holds hearings where the committees call in experts that tell members the effects of these policies and Congress fixes or mitigates the problems the experts make Congress aware of!
This House Republican Healthcare bill treats the American people like they're a bunch of suckers. The House Republicans with this bill are claiming we really care about the burdensome premium health insurance cost that could result from this dramatic change to the health care system this bill could wrought so we provide $15 billion over nine years in the bill to be given to the states to help lower premiums. As an American I ask what are we to do about year ten here if we need that $ 1.6 B on year nine to do right by the American people I fall on the side we are going to need that $1.6 B on year ten to do the same. If the Republican Party really cared about suppressing rising premiums on the American people from implementation of their law they would at minimum appropriate $1.6 B for this purpose on year one and increase it in subsequent years by the medical inflation rate and make this assistance program permanent. Permanent help the American people will support not an underlying agenda to dump this problem on the states that are ill equipped to handle it. This same deserves to be said about the provisions in the bill calling for $ 8 billion for high risk pools over five years to help people that have to go the high risk pools to get insurance because their state availed themselves of the bill's waiver program to allow pre-existing condition people to be charged more.
What the American people should find alarming about the House Republican's behavior in this whole health care legislative process is their lack of commitment to the truth and honesty. This writer watched a lot of the three hours of debate in the House on this bill and found it alarming how many of the Republican speakers were not honest about the effects of this bill they were clearly trying to pull the wool over the American people's eyes about the ramifications of this bill. The Republican speakers time and again were saying that Americans with pre-existing conditions were not going to have to pay more for health insurance because of their condition and were not going to have any trouble getting health insurance because of their condition with the Republican bill. Also, these Republicans were repeatedly saying things like the Republican bill does not take away protections for medical claim coverage on health insurance in areas like: hospital coverage, mental health and addiction treatment, emergency services, pharmaceuticals, etc.. This behavior by the Republicans completely discounted and ignored the effect of the waiver provisions in their bill. These waiver programs are going to be heavily utilized by the states with the effect of wiping out a huge portion of the protections in the current health care system. To realize the ramifications of their waiver provisions the only thing these Republicans had to do is to listen to their own statements about the humongous problems with the current ACA system, the ACA has forced Americans into different health plans where they can no longer see their doctor their happy with and their premiums and deductibles have skyrocketed. The House Republican bill doesn't solve these problems. Solving these problems would involve rolling back ACA mandates, doing things like: ending free preventive care but just instead excluding it from the deductible, stop parity between mental health and physical health treatment meaning in part mandating only treatment for addictions, schizophrenia and suicidal danger, lift the out of pocket limit mandate for people that can afford to pay more for this latter group make it five percent of their assets excluding their retirement savings, primary residence, cars and ten thousand dollars in their checking account and stop all the abuses in the pharmaceutical industry like mandate on Drug companies Americans don't get charged any more for drugs than what a drug company sells its drugs for in a list of countries which are America's top trading competitor countries. Solving these problems would involve taking all the money saved in the federal governments subsidy program and in the Medicaid program by the aforementioned and the many other changes sharp government officials could come up with and steering it into a reimbursement program for the individual insurance market to reimburse the insurance companies in this market for their sickest enrollees claims so the insurance companies can dramatically lower premiums and deductibles. To realize the consequences of this bill the Republicans need only acknowledge that the only relief this bill has given to the states to get their citizens out from under these humongous problems of the ACA is exercising the waiver programs. The waiver programs get those people with pre-existing conditions out of the insurance pool for the individual insurance exchange market because it allows them to be subject to underwriting for their medical problems thus eliminating the by far biggest premium cost problem in the individual market. States exercising the waiver program for the essential benefit mandate provides the same kind of premium cost relief. For individual members of the Republican House not to recognize these obvious realities in public discussions of the bill sorry to say indicates they have an honesty problem!
There is a lot of hidden major destructive forces in this House Republican healthcare bill that the American public hasn't been made aware of to the great extent that circumstances warrant. For instance, in regards to employer sponsored health insurance the ACA brought a lot of good insurance protections to the insurance market like for hospital stays, mental health treatment, pharmaceutical coverage, etc.. The American people need to realize that the law in America is that American employers that offer health insurance are not required to comply with the essential benefit mandate that applies for the state they operate in an American employer can choose at that employers complete discretion to be bound by the essential benefit mandate that applies to any state in America. So what this means is that if this Republican bill becomes law once one and again were only talking about one of the fifty states exercises the waiver program and gets out from under the ACA's essential benefit mandate all employer sponsored health insurance plans across America get out from under the ACA's essential benefit mandate. Statistics indicate that about half of the American people excluding Medicare age citizens get their health insurance through employer sponsored health insurance; this is a lot of people that are going to have these vital health insurance protections yanked from them if this Republican health insurance bill becomes law!
Some observations about the Republican Healthcare effort to date. One Democrat Congressman in the debate really hit the nail on the head about this House Republican bill when he essentially said this bill is a tax repeal bill masquerading as a healthcare reform bill; it's clear from an examination of the bill that the core purpose of the bill is tax or tax like repeals and everything else is an effort to leave the remaining healthcare system in a palatable state. One could list all the tax or tax-like repeal items in this bill and it would make for a list of at least eleven items. The Republicans are miscalculating here with this tax repeal priority the majority of the American people don't care about these tax issues they care about lower premiums, deductibles and more choice. If Republicans want to get right down to it most people think the ACA taxes on participants in the health care system are completely fair the federal gov't through the subsidy program and Medicaid expansion gives these health care providers, insurance companies and drug companies more paying customers it is only fair to have these businesses kick back some of their additional profit to the federal government to help pay for these helpful programs. Most Americans don't have a problem with the penalty the ACA provides on people that don't carry health insurance because American's dislike free-loaders and unfairness which is what you have if people don't buy insurance and can afford to because if they get sick or hurt America's hospitals have to treat them even if they cannot pay. Most people don't have a problem with employers paying a penalty if they don't offer their employees an employer sponsored health insurance plan the way most American's see it is that if an employer uses and benefits from an American workers labor that employer can help pay some of the cost to keep that worker in good health, these employers are getting off easy in some countries employers have to pay like nine percent of a workers wages to the government to help pay for the country's healthcare system.
The Republican bill misses the mark on fixing Medicaid per capita stipends adjusted for medical inflation may sound nice but practically shifts the cost problem to the states that are largely just keeping their head above water on Medicaid. The only responsible improvement course at this juncture is to roll back the overall ACA insurance mandates on all insurance to make the mandates really essential and necessary not a Christmas wish list and once that is done is require the states to get HMO like programs for their Medicaid programs like the state of Indiana and in these HMO programs curtail utilization to incentivize Medicaid enrollees to only use the coverage to the degree they really need by having coverage limits for the program like one can only see their primary care physician four times a year unless they have a serious heath problem like diabetes or hypertension, etc.. In short, change the Medicaid system from a system where enrollees can utilize the Medicaid health care services in an unlimited fashion and the state and federal government just pays the bill to a system where there is checks to insure the utilization of health care service is called for, is responsible, this has to significantly bring down cost in the program!
There is a lot of hidden major destructive forces in this House Republican healthcare bill that the American public hasn't been made aware of to the great extent that circumstances warrant. For instance, in regards to employer sponsored health insurance the ACA brought a lot of good insurance protections to the insurance market like for hospital stays, mental health treatment, pharmaceutical coverage, etc.. The American people need to realize that the law in America is that American employers that offer health insurance are not required to comply with the essential benefit mandate that applies for the state they operate in an American employer can choose at that employers complete discretion to be bound by the essential benefit mandate that applies to any state in America. So what this means is that if this Republican bill becomes law once one and again were only talking about one of the fifty states exercises the waiver program and gets out from under the ACA's essential benefit mandate all employer sponsored health insurance plans across America get out from under the ACA's essential benefit mandate. Statistics indicate that about half of the American people excluding Medicare age citizens get their health insurance through employer sponsored health insurance; this is a lot of people that are going to have these vital health insurance protections yanked from them if this Republican health insurance bill becomes law!
Some observations about the Republican Healthcare effort to date. One Democrat Congressman in the debate really hit the nail on the head about this House Republican bill when he essentially said this bill is a tax repeal bill masquerading as a healthcare reform bill; it's clear from an examination of the bill that the core purpose of the bill is tax or tax like repeals and everything else is an effort to leave the remaining healthcare system in a palatable state. One could list all the tax or tax-like repeal items in this bill and it would make for a list of at least eleven items. The Republicans are miscalculating here with this tax repeal priority the majority of the American people don't care about these tax issues they care about lower premiums, deductibles and more choice. If Republicans want to get right down to it most people think the ACA taxes on participants in the health care system are completely fair the federal gov't through the subsidy program and Medicaid expansion gives these health care providers, insurance companies and drug companies more paying customers it is only fair to have these businesses kick back some of their additional profit to the federal government to help pay for these helpful programs. Most Americans don't have a problem with the penalty the ACA provides on people that don't carry health insurance because American's dislike free-loaders and unfairness which is what you have if people don't buy insurance and can afford to because if they get sick or hurt America's hospitals have to treat them even if they cannot pay. Most people don't have a problem with employers paying a penalty if they don't offer their employees an employer sponsored health insurance plan the way most American's see it is that if an employer uses and benefits from an American workers labor that employer can help pay some of the cost to keep that worker in good health, these employers are getting off easy in some countries employers have to pay like nine percent of a workers wages to the government to help pay for the country's healthcare system.
The Republican bill misses the mark on fixing Medicaid per capita stipends adjusted for medical inflation may sound nice but practically shifts the cost problem to the states that are largely just keeping their head above water on Medicaid. The only responsible improvement course at this juncture is to roll back the overall ACA insurance mandates on all insurance to make the mandates really essential and necessary not a Christmas wish list and once that is done is require the states to get HMO like programs for their Medicaid programs like the state of Indiana and in these HMO programs curtail utilization to incentivize Medicaid enrollees to only use the coverage to the degree they really need by having coverage limits for the program like one can only see their primary care physician four times a year unless they have a serious heath problem like diabetes or hypertension, etc.. In short, change the Medicaid system from a system where enrollees can utilize the Medicaid health care services in an unlimited fashion and the state and federal government just pays the bill to a system where there is checks to insure the utilization of health care service is called for, is responsible, this has to significantly bring down cost in the program!
This House Republican Healthcare bill treats the American people like they're a bunch of suckers. The House Republicans with this bill are claiming we really care about the burdensome premium health insurance cost that could result from this dramatic change to the health care system this bill could wrought so we provide $15 billion over nine years in the bill to be given to the states to help lower premiums. As an American I ask what are we to do about year ten here if we need that $ 1.6 B on year nine to do right by the American people I fall on the side we are going to need that $1.6 B on year ten to do the same. If the Republican Party really cared about suppressing rising premiums on the American people from implementation of their law they would at minimum appropriate $1.6 B for this purpose on year one and increase it in subsequent years by the medical inflation rate and make this assistance program permanent. Permanent help the American people will support not an underlying agenda to dump this problem on the states that are ill equipped to handle it. This same deserves to be said about the provisions in the bill calling for $ 8 billion for high risk pools over five years to help people that have to go the high risk pools to get insurance because their state availed themselves of the bill's waiver program to allow pre-existing condition people to be charged more.
What the American people should find alarming about the House Republican's behavior in this whole health care legislative process is their lack of commitment to the truth and honesty. This writer watched a lot of the three hours of debate in the House on this bill and found it alarming how many of the Republican speakers were not honest about the effects of this bill they were clearly trying to pull the wool over the American people's eyes about the ramifications of this bill. The Republican speakers time and again were saying that Americans with pre-existing conditions were not going to have to pay more for health insurance because of their condition and were not going to have any trouble getting health insurance because of their condition with the Republican bill. Also, these Republicans were repeatedly saying things like the Republican bill does not take away protections for medical claim coverage on health insurance in areas like: hospital coverage, mental health and addiction treatment, emergency services, pharmaceuticals, etc.. This behavior by the Republicans completely discounted and ignored the effect of the waiver provisions in their bill. These waiver programs are going to be heavily utilized by the states with the effect of wiping out a huge portion of the protections in the current health care system. To realize the ramifications of their waiver provisions the only thing these Republicans had to do is to listen to their own statements about the humongous problems with the current ACA system, the ACA has forced Americans into different health plans where they can no longer see their doctor their happy with and their premiums and deductibles have skyrocketed. The House Republican bill doesn't solve these problems. Solving these problems would involve rolling back ACA mandates, doing things like: ending free preventive care but just instead excluding it from the deductible, stop parity between mental health and physical health treatment meaning in part mandating only treatment for addictions, schizophrenia and suicidal danger, lift the out of pocket limit mandate for people that can afford to pay more for this latter group make it five percent of their assets excluding their retirement savings, primary residence, cars and ten thousand dollars in their checking account and stop all the abuses in the pharmaceutical industry like mandate on Drug companies Americans don't get charged any more for drugs than what a drug company sells its drugs for in a list of countries which are America's top trading competitor countries. Solving these problems would involve taking all the money saved in the federal governments subsidy program and in the Medicaid program by the aforementioned and the many other changes sharp government officials could come up with and steering it into a reimbursement program for the individual insurance market to reimburse the insurance companies in this market for their sickest enrollees claims so the insurance companies can dramatically lower premiums and deductibles. To realize the consequences of this bill the Republicans need only acknowledge that the only relief this bill has given to the states to get their citizens out from under these humongous problems of the ACA is exercising the waiver programs. The waiver programs get those people with pre-existing conditions out of the insurance pool for the individual insurance exchange market because it allows them to be subject to underwriting for their medical problems thus eliminating the by far biggest premium cost problem in the individual market. States exercising the waiver program for the essential benefit mandate provides the same kind of premium cost relief. For individual members of the Republican House not to recognize these obvious realities in public discussions of the bill sorry to say indicates they have an honesty problem!
There is a lot of hidden major destructive forces in this House Republican healthcare bill that the American public hasn't been made aware of to the great extent that circumstances warrant. For instance, in regards to employer sponsored health insurance the ACA brought a lot of good insurance protections to the insurance market like for hospital stays, mental health treatment, pharmaceutical coverage, etc.. The American people need to realize that the law in America is that American employers that offer health insurance are not required to comply with the essential benefit mandate that applies for the state they operate in an American employer can choose at that employers complete discretion to be bound by the essential benefit mandate that applies to any state in America. So what this means is that if this Republican bill becomes law once one and again were only talking about one of the fifty states exercises the waiver program and gets out from under the ACA's essential benefit mandate all employer sponsored health insurance plans across America get out from under the ACA's essential benefit mandate. Statistics indicate that about half of the American people excluding Medicare age citizens get their health insurance through employer sponsored health insurance; this is a lot of people that are going to have these vital health insurance protections yanked from them if this Republican health insurance bill becomes law!
Some observations about the Republican Healthcare effort to date. One Democrat Congressman in the debate really hit the nail on the head about this House Republican bill when he essentially said this bill is a tax repeal bill masquerading as a healthcare reform bill; it's clear from an examination of the bill that the core purpose of the bill is tax or tax like repeals and everything else is an effort to leave the remaining healthcare system in a palatable state. One could list all the tax or tax-like repeal items in this bill and it would make for a list of at least eleven items. The Republicans are miscalculating here with this tax repeal priority the majority of the American people don't care about these tax issues they care about lower premiums, deductibles and more choice. If Republicans want to get right down to it most people think the ACA taxes on participants in the health care system are completely fair the federal gov't through the subsidy program and Medicaid expansion gives these health care providers, insurance companies and drug companies more paying customers it is only fair to have these businesses kick back some of their additional profit to the federal government to help pay for these helpful programs. Most Americans don't have a problem with the penalty the ACA provides on people that don't carry health insurance because American's dislike free-loaders and unfairness which is what you have if people don't buy insurance and can afford to because if they get sick or hurt America's hospitals have to treat them even if they cannot pay. Most people don't have a problem with employers paying a penalty if they don't offer their employees an employer sponsored health insurance plan the way most American's see it is that if an employer uses and benefits from an American workers labor that employer can help pay some of the cost to keep that worker in good health, these employers are getting off easy in some countries employers have to pay like nine percent of a workers wages to the government to help pay for the country's healthcare system.
The Republican bill misses the mark on fixing Medicaid per capita stipends adjusted for medical inflation may sound nice but practically shifts the cost problem to the states that are largely just keeping their head above water on Medicaid. The only responsible improvement course at this juncture is to roll back the overall ACA insurance mandates on all insurance to make the mandates really essential and necessary not a Christmas wish list and once that is done is require the states to get HMO like programs for their Medicaid programs like the state of Indiana and in these HMO programs curtail utilization to incentivize Medicaid enrollees to only use the coverage to the degree they really need by having coverage limits for the program like one can only see their primary care physician four times a year unless they have a serious heath problem like diabetes or hypertension, etc.. In short, change the Medicaid system from a system where enrollees can utilize the Medicaid health care services in an unlimited fashion and the state and federal government just pays the bill to a system where there is checks to insure the utilization of health care service is called for, is responsible, this has to significantly bring down cost in the program!
There is a lot of hidden major destructive forces in this House Republican healthcare bill that the American public hasn't been made aware of to the great extent that circumstances warrant. For instance, in regards to employer sponsored health insurance the ACA brought a lot of good insurance protections to the insurance market like for hospital stays, mental health treatment, pharmaceutical coverage, etc.. The American people need to realize that the law in America is that American employers that offer health insurance are not required to comply with the essential benefit mandate that applies for the state they operate in an American employer can choose at that employers complete discretion to be bound by the essential benefit mandate that applies to any state in America. So what this means is that if this Republican bill becomes law once one and again were only talking about one of the fifty states exercises the waiver program and gets out from under the ACA's essential benefit mandate all employer sponsored health insurance plans across America get out from under the ACA's essential benefit mandate. Statistics indicate that about half of the American people excluding Medicare age citizens get their health insurance through employer sponsored health insurance; this is a lot of people that are going to have these vital health insurance protections yanked from them if this Republican health insurance bill becomes law!
Some observations about the Republican Healthcare effort to date. One Democrat Congressman in the debate really hit the nail on the head about this House Republican bill when he essentially said this bill is a tax repeal bill masquerading as a healthcare reform bill; it's clear from an examination of the bill that the core purpose of the bill is tax or tax like repeals and everything else is an effort to leave the remaining healthcare system in a palatable state. One could list all the tax or tax-like repeal items in this bill and it would make for a list of at least eleven items. The Republicans are miscalculating here with this tax repeal priority the majority of the American people don't care about these tax issues they care about lower premiums, deductibles and more choice. If Republicans want to get right down to it most people think the ACA taxes on participants in the health care system are completely fair the federal gov't through the subsidy program and Medicaid expansion gives these health care providers, insurance companies and drug companies more paying customers it is only fair to have these businesses kick back some of their additional profit to the federal government to help pay for these helpful programs. Most Americans don't have a problem with the penalty the ACA provides on people that don't carry health insurance because American's dislike free-loaders and unfairness which is what you have if people don't buy insurance and can afford to because if they get sick or hurt America's hospitals have to treat them even if they cannot pay. Most people don't have a problem with employers paying a penalty if they don't offer their employees an employer sponsored health insurance plan the way most American's see it is that if an employer uses and benefits from an American workers labor that employer can help pay some of the cost to keep that worker in good health, these employers are getting off easy in some countries employers have to pay like nine percent of a workers wages to the government to help pay for the country's healthcare system.
The Republican bill misses the mark on fixing Medicaid per capita stipends adjusted for medical inflation may sound nice but practically shifts the cost problem to the states that are largely just keeping their head above water on Medicaid. The only responsible improvement course at this juncture is to roll back the overall ACA insurance mandates on all insurance to make the mandates really essential and necessary not a Christmas wish list and once that is done is require the states to get HMO like programs for their Medicaid programs like the state of Indiana and in these HMO programs curtail utilization to incentivize Medicaid enrollees to only use the coverage to the degree they really need by having coverage limits for the program like one can only see their primary care physician four times a year unless they have a serious heath problem like diabetes or hypertension, etc.. In short, change the Medicaid system from a system where enrollees can utilize the Medicaid health care services in an unlimited fashion and the state and federal government just pays the bill to a system where there is checks to insure the utilization of health care service is called for, is responsible, this has to significantly bring down cost in the program!
