I haven't seen any meaningful restraints on premiums or bad faith behavior by insurers, other than not allowing them to deny applicants based on preexisting conditions. Which of course doesn't prevent them from kicking folk to the curb later if it turns out they have some sort of expensive problem.
I'm thinking this whole thing is a big anchor being handed to the Dems. The pressure to pass ANYTHING because ANYTHING is better than 'losing' is obviously intense, but they would be well advised to sit back and dispassionately consider the electoral ramifications of forcing people to buy a shitty product offered by companies ruled by the profit motive.
Digby offers a more measured response. This quote resonates strongly:
ROBERT KUTTNER: Think about it, the difference between social insurance and an individual mandate is this. Social insurance everybody pays for it through their taxes, so you don't think of Social Security as a compulsory individual mandate. You think of it as a benefit, as a protection that your government provides. But an individual mandate is an order to you to go out and buy some product from some private profit-making company, that in the case of a lot of moderate income people, you can't afford to buy. And the shell game here is that the affordable policies are either very high deductibles and co-pays, so you can afford the monthly premiums but then when you get sick, you have to pay a small fortune out of pocket before the coverage kicks in. Or if the coverage is decent, the premiums are unaffordable. And so here's the government doing the bidding of the private industry coercing people to buy profit-making products that maybe they can't afford and they call it health reform.
If this monstrosity isn't vastly more public-friendly by the time they birth it, the Dem national ticket can kiss my ass when voting time comes around.
Democratic voters are those battered spouses that promise to leave forever with every black eye, but always come back.
ReplyDeleteTrue in general.
ReplyDeleteBut this Dem voter has ten years of therapy under his belt, so they can fuck right off with this kind of shit.
I don't see SS as a benefit, I see it as something I won't get when I retire, although I hope I am wrong.
ReplyDeleteSurprisingly enough because we are so apart on the issue, agree with you 100% on the pre-existing conditions thing. I always thought yes, they won't deny those folks, just charge them so much nobody could afford it, along with what you wrote.
I agree with anonymous in that liberals always vote Democrat because "Republicans are evil", as if there are no other choices. I have not voted for a Republican for a while although maybe that means I am wasting my vote.
And something I saw that I thought was interesting was some group getting a law suit in order saying that the Feds do not have the authority to mandate individuals buy something from a private company. Not sure it would fly but an interesting question none the less.
Crazy times in that it seems nobody is happy with what is being considered on health care reform.
SS isn't going anywhere, because then we'd have legions of really old homeless people clogging the streets (well, for a little while- until they died), and not even the tax-phobic adolescents who make up most of the American electorate ACTUALLY want that to happen.
ReplyDeleteIf the G wants to TAX me, and in return it PROVIDES me with health care, that's fine. It's the sort of thing that is necessary for a 'society' to exist. But the senate mandate is the most corrosive sort of bullshit, a transfer of public resources to private industry, and an industry who's viability depends on NOT PROVIDING SERVICES to the 'customers' that need it most.
IF the Senate bill goes through largely unchanged (which seems likely, given the spinelessness of progressive dems and the intransigence of DINOs like Nelson that no changes be made or they will take their balls and go home), I hope we do get lawsuits and plenty of them.
I'll happily pay a tax for health insurance I can count on, but not to keep Wellpoint in the black.