Obama can say that you're getting a lot, but also saying that it "covers everyone," as if there's a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don't get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn't make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn't even conservative, free market or otherwise. It's some kind of weird corporatism that's very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.
Nobody's "getting covered" here. After all, people are already "free" to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won't make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn't or didn't want to write. (Digby)
This is shaping up to be a disaster on wheels–to be a bigger boondoggle than the Bush medicare prescription bill. I haven't made my mind up completely because things are still so fluid, but I'm leaning against unless things change or until it becomes
clearer to me that the positives outweigh the negatives. I'm not seeing that yet, and I trust Howard Dean more than I trust most of the other gasbags on
this issue who say this bill for all its limitations is still a step forward.
The individual mandate is for me the biggest problem, and if that's removed, I might be more supportive. The individual mandate was palatable only if there would be a public option. If the mandate stays in the bill, the bill should be opposed, unless someone can prove that there are mechanisms to prevent the insurance companies from charging whatever premiums they feel like.
For example: According to Dean with Lawrence O'Donnell last night (see below), the reform that would ban the insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions doesn't prevent the insurance companies from charging three times the already-very–expensive premium. So unless you qualify for the subsidies, does that mean you have to pay a fine if you refuse to pay an exorbitant tripled premium? So how does that improve your life if you have to pay a fine, because it's more affordable than the insurance premium–and then still have no insurance? And they call this reform? And even if you qualify for subsidies, what's to prevent the insurance companies from raising the premiums to require the government to pay outrageous subsidy amounts? Maybe there's an answer there, but I haven't heard about it yet.
It could be that we're still on a roller coaster, and this is just one of the dips. Maybe things will change for the better in the next week or so. But the individual mandate has to go at a minimum if there aren't some mechanisms to control premiums. Otherwise I'm with Dean–break it apart and deal with the issues separately making the main thrust of the bill to focus on industry regulation and reforms.
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