Senate Finance Committee to release health bill soon
From the NY Times:
Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, signaled his intentions in a telephone conference call with five other committee members who have been struggling for months to forge a bipartisan bill and break a partisan stalemate in Congress, an official familiar with the call said.
Strange don’t you think ? The Democrats have a majority in the House, and until Ted Kennedy died, a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. yet the NY Times somehow considers this a partisan stalemate! What the Times won’t admit is is it isn’t partisanship that’s holding it up, but constituent backlash which is freaking out some faux conservative Dems who may actually want to run again in 2010.
According to the Times, the bill would contain the following:
- Mandatory Health Insurance by all people
- No exclusions for pre-existing conditions – and a maximum that insurers can charge high risk people. Guess who the cost is shifting to – you got it- healthy young people. The ones who voted in droves for Obama. The irony is delicious, isn’t it?
- Employers must help pay for coverage for low income workers
- Medicaid will become accessible to those who are 133% of the Federal Poverty Level, and Subsidies would be available for people earning up to 300% of the Poverty Level. In case you aren’t paying attention, that is $66,000 for a family of four. And “subsidies” means wealth transfer, meaning higher taxes from those who earn more than that level.
- The new Medicaid recipients would be funded in part by States. Gee – how will they do that? Raise taxes of course. This would be Obama’s way of avoiding directly taxing his dear people. he would make the STATES do it, not the Federal Government! What a crock!
- The bill will create consumer owned health care co-ops to compete with private insurers. I’ll be eager to see the details on how exactly they plan on having the Fed subsidize and back up these co-ops.
and the coup d’grace:
To help finance the legislation, Mr. Baucus is expected to propose a new tax on insurance companies selling policies with premiums far exceeding the national average, roughly $13,000 a year for family coverage.
What do you think “Far Exceeding” would mean? And lets be real here – with large employers being self funded, its in the employers self interest to “mark up’ the value of the health insurance benefit they are providing so that they can generate maximum tax savings. the “value” of the insurance through a self-funded employer is not a transparent transaction since the employer is only buying reinsurance and paying the bills as they come. Anyone working for a Fortune 500 company should expect to be the recipient of the “Cadillac Health Plan” Tax they will be proposing. bet your bottom dollar on that one!
[...] legislation is S391 The Healthy Americans Act. I already reported on this to a small degree in Senate Finance Committee to release health bill soon. The good news is this bill is less than 200 pages long, so you should be able to read it [...]