Most Americans have little or no idea what’s actually contained in the health care reforms successfully passed despite fierce and unanimous Republican opposition. Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation reviews a few provisions:
“Since the bill's passage, the Department of Health and Human Services has set up a program to help people with preexisting health conditions get coverage through state or federal high-risk pools; established a program to help employers provide health insurance to early retirees; issued rebates to help pay drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries stuck in the "doughnut hole"; provided tax credits to small businesses to provide insurance coverage; and created a consumer-friendly Web site, http://HealthCare.gov, that rivals anything coming out of Silicon Valley (where our organization is based).
“Several popular provisions take effect Thursday [today]. They include allowing adult children up to age 26 to be on their parents' insurance; banning lifetime benefits caps and loosening annual limits on insurance coverage payouts; prohibiting insurance companies from kicking people off of their policies when they get sick; and requiring that newly purchased insurance policies cover preventive services at no cost to patients.”
Individually, Altman points out, these provisions have overwhelming support among the public. Many other provisions don’t go into effect until 2014, a concession that was made toward controlling budget deficits. Most of those are also widely popular, the one exception being that most people will eventually be required to have insurance, even if they have to buy it themselves. But universal coverage is the greatest cost saver in the plan, and I can see no real difference between requiring drivers to have auto insurance and everybody else to have health insurance. Besides, the cost of such coverage will be keyed to ability to pay and in fact will be minimal.
Almost all of the voluntarily uninsured today are young people who never believe they can get seriously ill or injured. They’re almost right, statistically, but those who do quickly convert to a public liability when they lose jobs and go on unemployment or welfare and become eligible for Medicaid. In other words, all the rest of us are involuntarily subsidizing their health care in the current system. Talk about socialism.
Altman notes that expansions of benefits in the past, including Medicare itself, were widely unpopular at the time they were passed, but opposition evaporated quickly as the programs began to take effect.
The Republicans’ “Pledge to American,” released today, promises to repeal Obama’s health care reforms. Not a chance. And when we begin to ask specific questions about things like why they want to repeal the exclusion of preexisting conditions for health coverage, they’re going to have a hard time answering.
Look for lots of prevarication and a quick return to talking points:
Talk about socialism.
[P.S.
Liberal elite media watch:
Neither NBC nor PBS ran a story on the changes in health care policy which went into effect today. Both covered the Republican Pledge to America.]
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