Health insurers won the pot. Reformers need a new game plan.

from In These Times:



Features » April 16, 2010

Fixing The ‘Big F*%#ing Deal’
Health insurers won the pot. Reformers need a new game plan.

By Roger Bybee


In a too-loud whisper to President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden famously characterized the signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as “a big f—-ing deal” at a triumphal White House news conference.

On a political level, the new law is indeed a “BFD.” But in terms of healthcare policy, many reformers believe that the law fundamentally reinforces insurers’ stranglehold on affordability and access. Consequently, the law will fail to restrain the market forces inexorably driving up healthcare costs, thereby forcing another confrontation further down the road as costs climb and coverage shrinks.

Still, America’s first comprehensive health plan represents a step toward establishing healthcare as a basic American right. The new law includes an extension of healthcare to 32 million uninsured people, some valuable protections against insurer abuses, and a badly needed expansion of Medicaid and community health clinics.

Although it passed by a slim 219-212 margin in the House, the law for expanded healthcare prevailed over shrill and intransigent “free-market” fundamentalists like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), who thundered against creating any “artificial” rights not directly mandated by God or the market. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5862/fixing_the_big_fing_deal

It surely does.

and at the end of the day, it didn't really do much at all for health CARE.

That is a BIG reach.
High Deductible/High Co-Pay "Bronze" Insurance is NOT "Health Care."

It would be much more honest to simply say that "the new law forces 32 Million previously uninsured people to purchase "Bronze Level" (High Deductible/High Co-Pay) policies of questionable worth from the For Profit Health Insurance Industry. Some will be assisted with a Federal Subsidy for the initial purchase, but most will be unable to use their "Bronze" Policies due to the high deductibles and Co-Pays."


"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for,
at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."
--- Paul Wellstone

Start lowering the eligibility to buy into Medicare by 10 years every few years. By the time it gets to the 30s, the insurance jerks will give up and realize they can still make money doing Medigap insurance, something they've had no problem doing all along.

They're just going to make less of it.

This should have been the plan all along, since Medicare already has the infrastructure in place and a new agency wouldn't have had to be designed from the ground up, like a public insurance option would have been.

Now if we can just keep the pressure on. Give the ability of the insurance giants to find out ways to screw us, that pressure should come back rather quickly.

it "trims" some 490 Billion from the Medicare program, most notably to the MediCare Advantage aspect of Medicare.

But hey - who cares? We needed to have this "uniquely American" way of reforming a system that needed reform without hurting those that caused us to need to reform it.

Our President said so!