Posted on 08/20/2009 3:31:43 AM PDT by Scanian
PRESIDENT Obama has stopped talking about "health-care reform." The new poll-tested phrase of the day is "health-insurance reform."
Specifically the president says he wants to protect people with "pre-existing conditions." He would require insurance companies to accept anyone who applies for coverage, regardless of their current health (a rule known as "guaranteed issue") and prohibit them from charging higher premiums to people who are sick (called "community rating").
But if that's what the president wants, he could already have a bill through Congress, with significant Republican support. In fact, even the insurance companies have agreed to it.
But the 1,017-page bill making its way through the House devotes all of six pages to insurance reform -- 30 pages, if you count all the definitions and supporting provisions, still less than 3 percent of the bill.
So why the bait and switch?
Well, one reason might be that Obama realizes that these insurance reforms aren't all they are cracked up to be.
After all, prohibiting insurers from charging more to older and sicker customers amounts to a tax on the young and healthy who must pay higher premiums to subsidize their less-healthy counterparts. And letting people buy insurance after they get sick means healthy people have little incentive to buy insurance.
Put the two together and, as the Congressional Budget Office has warned, the young and healthy are much more likely to simply do without insurance.
As the healthy leave the insurance pool, the proportion of sick in the pool grows ever greater, leading to higher premiums -- which in turn causes the healthiest remaining individuals to leave in what amounts to an insurance death spiral.
That's exactly what happened when New York adopted community rating and guaranteed issue in 1993.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
American people are not buying what he is selling.
Americans already have good healthcare. Even the ones who say they don’t have good healthcare; they just want FREE healthcare. When was the last time a sick person turned away from an American hospital?
Healthcare has nothing to do with the bill, it’s just a ruse. Consolidation and preservation of political and union power is the name of the game.
OBAMACARE’S BAIT & SWITCH/Free - Not Free who knew
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