The Senate Finance Committee has issued a set of “talking points”
about why the so-called America’s Health Future Act is good for
you. Missing is any straight talk about how the bill drives up
health care spending, rations care and will force people to wait
longer for less time with fewer doctors. Call it the Senate
Finance Committee’s “Snowe Job.”
Eight Things to Know about the America’s Healthy Future Act
(amended for honesty and accuracy):
1. Individuals and employers who are satisfied with
their current health insurance coverage can keep it and would not
be required to change health plans. (For
five years. And then individuals and employers — note, not
employees — would be forced to buy health plans through
exchanges that cost up to three times as much as their previous
coverage with benefits they may not want or use. Poor and working
class people will have no choice but Medicaid, which will double
in size even as physician pay is cut. Good luck trying to keep
your own doctor in either case unless you pay cash.)
2. No American can be denied health insurance or
charged more because of a pre-existing health
condition. (But since Americans who are and
stay healthy will subsidize those of us who get sick and enroll
only when they are seriously ill, the costs of coverage will
increase or care will be rationed. Probably both. And Americans
with pre-existing conditions will be denied coverage of drugs or
tests and be forced to wait to see specialists as health plans,
under the threat of a public option trigger, will cut access to
care that the Obama administration regards as
unnecessary.)
3. Health insurance companies will not be able to
discriminate on the basis of gender or health status — so
insurance companies can’t charge more for women or Americans who
are sick. (See above. This is pay for
performance in reverse.)
4. Health insurance companies will no longer
receive tax deductions if they give their executives excessive
salaries and compensation. (And this
improves health care access and quality how?)
5. Members of Congress will be required to buy
their health insurance through the same exchanges that people in
their own states will use, instead of having a separate
Congressional health plan. (Yes, but
Members of Congress will have their insurance deeply
subsidized.)
6. Health insurance companies will no longer be
able to limit how much coverage you can use over your lifetime or
how many benefits you can use each year.
(Sounds good. But remember the government will be making
those decisions from here on in. What benefits you use and how
much will be decided by a Quality Czar who will issue
reimbursement and coverage decisions for health exchanges based
on what bureaucrats believe is cost effective. That’s
rationing.)
7. The bill specifically says there will be no
Medicare benefit cuts for individuals. In fact, it strengthens
Medicare’s finances so the program can continue to provide
benefits for years to come. (Nice try. The
bill specifically cuts Medicare Advantage, the fastest growing
program for the most chronically ill seniors. Score a big one for
AARP which, in exchange for shilling for Obamacare, will reap
billions as seniors dumped from Advantage have to buy
supplemental coverage for what the shuttered program used to pay
for. It specifically reduces what doctors will get under
Medicare. It specifically seeks to reduce how much doctors do
based not on how sick people are — see the similar contradiction
in point 6 — but on the lowest amount of care given per person
regardless of burden of disease. And it micromanages the decision
of whether to pay for new technologies to assure that fewer
people get innovations more slowly. Maybe it’s not a cut, but it
is denial of care.
8. Low-and middle-income seniors will get 50
percent of their drug costs paid for when they reach the
so-called doughnut hole in the Medicare Part D prescription drug
program, where no coverage is provided today.
(And what drugs they get will be determined by a government
panel that will increasingly delay access to new drugs based on
price alone and without regard to individual differences.)
As health care costs and premiums go up, as they will,
government bureaucrats will pull the public option “trigger.”
Price controls and bigger government run health plans — the
public option — will follow.
