Rats....Bush has set the terms of the Health-Care Issue.

Budget to Hurt Poor People on Medicaid, Report Says

By ROBERT PEAR
Published: January 30, 2006

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — Millions of low-income people would have to pay more for health care under a bill worked out by Congress, and some of them would forgo care or drop out of Medicaid because of the higher co-payments and premiums, the Congressional Budget Office says in a new report.

The Senate has already approved the measure, the first major effort to rein in federal benefit programs in eight years, and the House is expected to vote Wednesday, clearing the bill for President Bush.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Bush plans to recommend a variety of steps to help people obtain health insurance and cope with rising health costs. But the bill, the Deficit Reduction Act, written by Congress over the last year with support from the White House, could reduce coverage and increase the number of uninsured, the budget office said.

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The report gives Democrats new ammunition to attack the bill. But they appear unlikely to defeat it, since the House approved a nearly identical version of the legislation by a vote of 212 to 206 on Dec. 19.

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"About one-third of those affected would be children, and almost half would be individuals with income below the poverty level," the report said in addressing co-payments for prescription drugs.

Continued @ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/politics/30budget.html

President Bush told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published today that he would be pushing "innovative programs" like "association health care plans" in his state of the union address. Take note of the term. The Bush-adopted "Association health plan" racket has been one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated against patients in the United States, and that takes into account the attrocities committed by HMOs against their patients. Bush's solution to the nation's health care woes is insurance that offers no insuring.

Here's how the association health plan fraud works. Patients who are insured by these low-premium junk policies can wind up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. That's right -- an insured patient in the United States can wind up paying unlimited amounts for serious medical conditions. That's because these skeletal benefit policies have no out-of-pocket maximum for how much you have to pay for your own treatment. But there is a limit on how much the insurers will pay for a whole range of treatments, from hospitalization to chemo.

Under "Bush-care," these association health plans would be peddled to far more people and removed from all state regulation and lawsuits which currently hold them accountable for some of the fraud they committ. The Department of Labor would have sole jurisdiction, rather than every state's courts, legislature, attorney general and insurance commissioner. If you want to understand the nighmare of these Bush-backed junk policies, consider the horror story of Doug Christensen told by the Los Angeles Times. He and his wife were marketed an association health plan policy through a phony association with a nice enough sounding name -- The National Association of Self-Employed, basically a shell group existing only to sell the junk insurance. The policy paid near nothing when Doug had a re-occurrence of his cancer. On his death bed, Doug asked Dana to divorce him to avoid liability for the half million dollars in bills that the association health plan wouldn't pay. Welcome to Bush Care. The first call Democratic Congressional leaders should make after the state of the union is for Dana Christensen to have a sit down with the President.

Bush-care is not just about letting traditional HMOs and insurers steal our money, then giving us a tax deduction to soften the blow of the theft, rather than stopping it. It's about giving credibility to insurance that isn't insurance. Without a limit on how much a patient can pay out of their own pocket for health care, insurance isn't worth a dime.