Four ways ObamaCare will take your health plan
September 1st, 2009 | by Brian Schwartz |Michael Tanner explains how House and Senate health policy bills threaten your health plan, either by making it illegal, or by encouraging your employer to dump it for a government plan:
- Politicians would force us all to buy insurance, as they define it, which would have a whole bunch of requirements. For example, Tanner writes: “rehabilitation services, mental health and substance-abuse treatment; preventive services (to be determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Preventive Services Task Force); and maternity, well-baby, and well-child care, as well as dental, vision, and hearing services for children under age 21.”
- “The Lewin Group, an independent actuarial firm, estimates that under the House version of the bill, as many as 89.5 million workers will simply lose their current employer-provided plan and be forced into government-run insurance.”
- “Seniors, too, could lose their current coverage, at least the 10.2 million seniors currently participating in the Medicare advantage program. … the House bill cuts payments to the Medicare Advantage program by roughly $156.3 billion over 10 years.
In response, many insurers are expected to stop participating in the program, while others increase the premiums they charge seniors. Millions of seniors will likely be forced off their current plan and back into traditional Medicare.”
- “the bills would all but eliminate Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), currently used by nearly 10 million Americans. Section 122 of the House bill and 311 of the Senate bill set minimum payout levels for any insurance policy. Insurance payouts must cover 70 percent of claims under the House bill and 76 percent under the Senate bill. And the bills also prohibit any deductibles or co-payments for preventive care. But virtually none of the high-deductible insurance plans in existence today, and required to accompany an HSA, can meet such a standard.”
Tanner starts and ends the article with flare:
In his most recent weekly radio address, President Barack Obama denounced “willful misrepresentations and outright distortions” in the debate over health care reform. He then went on to repeat one of the most outright distortions in the entire debate: “If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period.”
No, Mr. President. No you can’t. …
Any way you look at it, under the bills currently before Congress, millions of Americans will be forced out of their current health insurance plan, even if they are happy with it. Period.
It is time for the president to stop spreading this particular “willful misrepresentation and outright distortion.”
(HT, Ari Armstrong’s Twitter feed)
tags: Obama Care
