Obama Disappoints Again

Well, President Obama has released his "compromise" health care reform plan, and it's a pretty sad piece of legislation. Basically, it's the Senate plan with a couple of minor revisions, and some of those provision are distasteful -- it will still tax Americans that receive very good insurance coverage from their employer, force Americans to buy private insurance or be fined, bans abortion coverage in health insurance exchange plans (effectively banning coverage for poor people), and does not close the Medicare prescription drug "doughnut hole" until 2020.

There were three things that health care reform needed to do to be successful -- lower the cost of health insurance premiums, cover all Americans with health insurance, and stop insurance company discrimination because of age or pre-existing conditions. Obama's plan does only one of those three things. It does eliminate discrimination based on age and medical history, but it will not drive down the cost of premiums or provide coverage for all Americans.

Obama claims his plan will provide coverage for an additional 31 million Americans. That sounds good until you consider that around 50 million are without health insurance in this country. That still leaves 19 or 20 million out in the cold with no health insurance coverage and that is totally unacceptable.

His plan would also create health insurance exchanges in each state where businesses and individuals could go to purchase insurance if they can't afford the regular private insurance plans. Are the "less expensive" plans in these exchanges going to offer adequate coverage? That is doubtful. Why should private companies provide adequate low cost insurance to the exchanges when that would just reduce the number of regular policies they can sell. You can bet the health insurance plans would provide inadequate coverage (to the very people who can least afford inadequate coverage).

And the plan would do nothing to lower premium costs. The health insurance exchanges would offer lower prices only for policies that cover less. That would not drive down costs of private insurance. As for the new Health Insurance Rate Authority, it would not lower costs at all. It would just hopefully slow down the rise of private insurance costs, so the costs of premiums would still rise.

But the worse thing this clearly inadequate plan would do is leave insurance company employees in charge of deciding what treatment a patient could get (something only a doctor should decide). It does not even guarantee the patient has a choice of doctor and hospital. Most private insurance plans force patients to pay a larger portion if they want a doctor or hospital not on that company's approved list.

The saddest part is this whole thing could have been much simpler and easier. All they had to do was offer all Americans an option of public insurance that guaranteed choice of doctor and hospital, cut out the profit from insurance coverage, and guaranteed adequate coverage. A simple way to do this would be to open Medicare enrollment to all citizens. This would even have the effect of lowering costs for private insurance for those who still wanted it (because the private companies would have to compete with the public option price).

Passing this weak, complicated and insufficient plan would be tantamount to putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. It may look like you've done something, but the patient has not really been helped. I expect the Republicans will filibuster this bill to its death, but if they don't then progressives in Congress need to kill it. Then they need to start over and pass a bill with a strong public option using the reconciliation process.

President Obama and some Democrats seem to think they can fool the American people by calling this mess of a plan "health care reform". They are wrong. Passing this plan may actually cost them more votes than doing nothing because it will discourage many progressive voters. They could easily vote for a third party or just stay home.

They were elected to pass real health care reform -- not provide private insurance companies with a giant payday. This plan represents a failure of the mission they were given.