Is this the choices...the Senate Health Insurance Bill...

[SHRED]

...or nothing?

What a tough spot to be in.

I go back and forth.
To pass this insurance giveaway without a PO or Medicare 55+ seems obscene to me.
To pass nothing seems more obscene because of the regulations in it that are needed and the fact that this appears to be the only window for a long time considering the SCOTUS ruling.

I am torn between 2 obscenities.


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[zipplewrath]

1. I've been there

What it really came down to for me was the overall structure this creates. I actually could have swallowed the whole "no public option" part, not to mention that this bill only makes vague attempts to actually do anything about the increasing cost of health care delivery. The end result for me was that the overalls structure really is nothing more than an attempt by the federal government to take over regulation of the health INSURANCE industry from the states.

Regulation works, to what ever degree necessary anyway, for industries in which free market forces can be expected to control costs, incentivize innovation, and respond to regulation. It's never perfect, and in some industries it is horribly subject to infiltration of the very industries being regulated through lobbying and appointment of the regulators from industry. When it goes wrong (see the recent banking fiasco) it goes badly wrong. And a bit like NAFTA, it is always subject to the forces of DEregulation.

Regulation isn't going to fix the health CARE cost problem. As much as the insurance industry model is a problem, the core problem is really just the ever expanding costs of health care. Without some sort of single payer, nationalized health care system, we aren't going to get control of the costs. We'll merely regulate the underlying profits to some extent. We HAVE to get away from fee for service and that isn't going to happen through regulation.

So I can't support this bill because it basically codifies fee for service and the insurance industry model into law. It will become the underpinning of the whole system and reforming it at THAT point will be even harder than this. Only by then, you'll have all the companies receiving their profits from subsidies using them to lobby to defend that existing system.

As much as the insurance companies are a problem, the underlying problem of spiraling health care costs isn't of their creation. It is inherent in the way the system is structured. Otherwise we'd all just pay retail and avoid dealing with the insurance industry at all, other than having some sort of catastrophic plan for major impacts. This bill codifies this problem into federal law, and will create federal regulators whose job depends upon defending its basic structure.