"The President's Plan for Health Reform"
Selected bullet points from the Organizing for America website:
The President’s plan:
Ends discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.
That sounds good. People certainly shouldn’t be denied access to healthcare for being sick. But…this does increase costs to the insurance industry.
Limits premium discrimination based on gender and age.
Discrimination…always bad, right? Although adjusting premiums based on risk levels is how insurance companies operate at a profit, and this would take that away. Oh well…profits are evil anyways.
Caps out-of-pocket expenses so people don’t go broke when they get sick.
No one should have to declare bankruptcy just because they got sick and had some medical bills. But if we cap expenses to the people, we also cap revenues to the insurance companies.
Won’t add a dime to the deficit and is paid for upfront.
Whew! I was really starting to get worried about the deficit.
Offers a public health insurance option to provide the uninsured and those who can’t find affordable coverage with a real choice.
“The public option”: sounds like a sturdy, earnest safety net for hardworking Americans. There’s no way it could ever become a monolithic government money pit, right? Medicare/Medicaid has ballooned up to about $700 billion a year with costs spiralling out of control – but I’m sure the “public option” would remain a fairly small, insignificant government expenditure…unless something happened like…the collapse of the health insurance industry?
Fortunately, there’s no way the health insurance industry could possibly collapse. Unless, perhaps the government were to
- Increase costs by mandating coverage
- Remove the ability to adjust premiums based on risk levels
- Cap revenues to the insurance companies
The arrogance of our politicians to think that they can micromanage the minutiae of a 15 trillion dollar economy, from healthcare expenses to car manufacturing, will only end in tragedy. We have only to look so far as the grand communist experiment of the Soviet Union to understand this. Learning from past experiences and applying that knowledge to future endeavors is a fairly fundamental human characteristic. Why are we allowing our politicians to ignore logic and reason?
