Firedoglake: The Senate Bill Is Designed To Make Your Health Insurance Worse

[Hissyspit]

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/12/15/the-senate-bill-is-designed-to-make-your-health-insurance-worse/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CampaignSilo+%28Jane+Hamsher+Campaign+Silo%29

The Senate Bill Is Designed To Make Your Health Insurance Worse

By: Jon Walker Tuesday December 15, 2009 7:46 am  

The sole defense of this massive corporate giveaway, formally known as the Senate health care reform bill, is that it would still do some “good,” helping millions of the uninsured. Unfortunately, the bill would dramatically worsen the quality of current insurance coverage for tens of millions Americans, thanks to the new excise tax on insurance plans. It is unlikely that any of the remaining “good” in this bill will outweigh the massive amount of harm.

Most of the “help” this bill will do is dubious at best. Help is being defined as giving insufficient subsides to Americans now forced by the government to buy extremely expensive, poorly regulated, junk insurance. Without banning annual limits and an extremely high out-of-pocket cap (which thanks to a massive loophole is not really capped at all), the insurance regulations are basically meaningless. Having this new, mandated “coverage” will not stop you from being bankrupted by accumulated medical debt should you get seriously ill. Insurance that does not protect you from financial ruin if you get sick makes a mockery of the entire concept health insurance.

The harm this bill will do thanks to the excise tax on employer-provided insurance benefits is enormous. The health care bill is designed with the goal of making millions of middle class Americans’ health insurance coverage much worse. That is not a bug, it is a feature.

The excise tax is meant to force your employer to cut back your insurance benefits, reduce your coverage, and increase your co-pays and deductibles. This is not the conclusion of partisan think tanks, bloggers, or activists, this is the conclusion of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). They CBO concluded:

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[bdamomma]

1. I think this is what they want us to believe, then they can

kill the bill, and healthcare will never come up again on the radar. This is what the Insurance companies want then they can continue business as usual.

[villager]

2. so you're saying, specifically, that the CBO analysis cited in the article

is itself a ruse for the insurance companies, and secretly -- despite the language in the bill -- it's actually a "good bill?"

:shrug:

[bdamomma]

3. I don't know what to believe, but certain parties want this Healthcare Reform

to die off. Insurance companies are just hoping that it dies.

[Junkdrawer]

4. The biggest single lie in the whole Heathcare Debate: Insurance Companies oppose "reform".....

Insurance Companies are not stupid. They understand PERFECTLY that the vast majority of people hate them with a passion.

So they've been working to WRITE the healthcare legislation while publicly fighting against its passage.

When will we get REAL Healthcare Reform? When we stop falling for all the PR tricks and get as effective representation as K-Street lobbyists provide the corporate interests. And not before.

[flyarm]

5. and it was the plan all along and it was planned to use Lieberman as the scapegoat!

Remember Joe Lieberman was Obama’s Mentor in the Senate

By: fflambeau Monday December 14, 2009 10:05 pm

Those who are up in arms over Sen. Joe Lieberman’s "veto" of the extension of Medicare should remember this. When Sen. Barack Obama arrived in Washington, D.C. in 2005, he selected as his mentor none other than: Joe Lieberman.

Here’s David Sirota writing about this, after discussing Obama’s stab in the back of the progressive Lamont in Connecticut and his stab in the back of the progressive Christine Cegelis (Obama backed Duckworth) way back in 2006:

snip:

Other sources, including the Hartford Courant, reported that Obama chose Lieberman as his mentor.]

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/18929

[TwilightGardener]

6. I thought that annual limits were re-banned (after they had been quietly inserted).

[NashVegas]

7. Romney Care?

Or something worse?