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Insurance Industry’s Plan: Deja Vu |
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Today, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the health insurance industry front group, released their proposal for health care reform. Here are the main policy points:
- Controlling costs: Health plans are urging Congress to set a bold target of reducing the future growth in health care costs by 30 percent over the next five years. Based on the current projected growth rate of 6.6 percent, this could produce a cumulative savings of more than $500 billion over five years.
- Helping consumers and purchasers: Health plans propose that a new portable health plan be available to individuals and small businesses in all states. This affordable “essential benefits plan” would provide coverage for prevention and wellness as well as acute and chronic care. To maintain affordability, the essential benefits plan would not be subject to varying and conflicting state benefit mandates.
- Achieving universal coverage: Health plans propose guaranteed coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions in conjunction with an enforceable individual coverage mandate. To help working families afford coverage, advanceable and refundable tax credits should be available, phasing out as income approaches 400 percent of the federal poverty line.
- Adding value: Health plans commit to streamlining administrative processes and propose making targeted investments in our public health infrastructure. The plan also calls for refocusing our health care system on keeping people healthy, intervening early, and providing coordinated care for chronic conditions; adopting uniform standards for quality, reporting, and information technology; and investing more in research to better understand which treatments and therapies work best – for the nation as a whole and for specific patients.
Tax credits? Insurance across state lines? More pledges that the industry can self-regulate? A lot of this seems really familiar. A lot of this was part of John McCain’s health care plan.
Doesn’t the insurance industry realize John McCain was crushed in a large part due to the money Obama spent promoting his health care plan and demonizing McCain’s? The fact that one month after a landslide election the insurance industry would come out with a proposal containing large parts of a roundly defeated health care plan show that they are hopelessly out of touch.
I thought this argument was over. I thought America rejected McCain-style health care. But I guess we have to go over it one more time.
First, tax credits don’t work.
Second, while we at Health Care for America Now are for a standard benefits package, the question is who gets to decide those benfits. And that brings us to the next point.
Third, the insurance industry can’t self-regulate. Insurance costs are skyrocketing. The ranks of the uninsured are growing. The industry keeps making more and more money. They never have and never will look out for the public’s best interest. In fact, this proposal is simply a way of making more money. As Igor Volsky at Think Progress points out:
AHIP is all for “affordable” coverage on the government’s dime. That is, rather than agreeing to end premium discrimination based on age or sex, it wants the government to issue tax credits and cap total health expenditures for lower-income individuals to protect Americans from bankruptcy. The plan calls on the government to ensure affordability, while protecting industry profits.
And that’s the truth, right there.
(also posted at the NOW! blog)
Can you point me to a document that explains the plan you’re supporting? I’ve googled it and it doesn’t seem to actually exist. In its place I find an endless variety of opinions and assumptions based on orphaned statements and soundbites. But no plan. I’ve also tried reading the pdf at Obama’s site but it doesn’t actually say what he’ll do or how he’ll do it. It mostly just uses those round, political, prose-like phrases of, “so-and-so will support such-and-such for the benefit of shiny happiness and American puppies everywhere.” And I don’t have the kind of pain threshold to go sifting through empty gestural platitudes in search of an actual proposal which may or may not lie therein.
So do you have any declarative statements I could get, instead? For example: regarding the restrictions and regulations that this plan would place on the insurers? …Perhaps listed one by one and accompanied with an explanation why each is needed, and how each will fix/change/improve upon something. Maybe with a separate section describing this “insurer’s marketplace” I’ve heard the conservatives lamenting, and its function; With yet another section to describe in what ways the public-insurer created would differ from the gaggle of private entities it would operate next to.
I would personally love it if you could find one that spoke less often of cost and affordability than it did of people, treatment, and medicine… but I’m sure I’m asking way too much on that point.
Here are the principles HCAN supports. They have yet to be translated into legislation (that’s Obama and Congress’ job), but we will support any plan that encompasses these principles.
http://healthcareforamericanow.org/site/content/about_us/
Now, that one: you know I’ve read already. And while I credit it with being the more concise, deliberate version of the two, it still doesn’t fill the gap what’s lacking in the way of a plan.
I’m not looking for final-draft legislation here, I’d just like to see some proposals of methodology and explanations of those proposals. Without at least that much you can’t really claim to have a plan or a solution, just a goal set; Which would be well enough - that is: if half the world wasn’t up in arms, flapping their gums about some “plan” that, as of yet, remains an ontological negative.
There will be a reckoning, master Jedi. I must prepare a position paper regarding the need for Universal Health Care in America, by which I shall guilt both you and Obama into doing what we all know is just and true. Muahahahahaha.
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Muahahahahahahahahahahahah!