- If you are a young adult, you can now stay on your parents’ health plan until your 26th birthday, if you do not have coverage of your own.
- If you are among 4 million eligible small businesses, you can receive tax credits if you choose to offer coverage to your employees – covering 35% of the cost of coverage.
- If you are a child under age 19, you can no longer be denied coverage by an insurance company for having a “pre-existing condition.”
- Your insurance company can no longer place a lifetime limit on your coverage. Such limits have caused some families to declare bankruptcy.
- If you are a senior, you will now be receiving a 50% discount on brand-name drugs if you enter the Medicare Part D ‘donut hole’ coverage gap – a discount that grows until the ‘donut hole’ is closed in 2020.
- You can no longer be dropped from coverage by your insurance company simply because you get sick.
- Your insurance company can no longer place restrictive annual limits on your coverage – with annual limits completely eliminated by 2014.
- If you are in a new plan, you now have free coverage of key preventive services, such as immunizations, mammograms, and other cancer screenings.
- Your insurance company must now spend at least 80 percent of premiums on covering medical services – rather than administrative expenses, CEO pay, and profits.
- Your insurance company must now publish on the Internet detailed justifications for any premium increasesthey are seeking that are more than 10 percent.
This health care reform was and is for you and me. It's not for the insurance or health care or pharmaceutical industries for once.
Our system doesn't work for at least 51 million Americans who have no coverage at all and many more millions of Americans who can't afford what coverage they've got and are paying for.
And what little improvements we got and will get out of this, the Republicans want to repeal.
More insanity.
Let's make sure we don't let them take this away, for starters.
Then let's add to it. We still need the "public option" so we can give the health insurance industry some strong, honest competition.
This is one more way we can take back our country.
Link to original post: http://www.democraticleader.gov/news/reports?id=0522
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9 comments:
Why on earth is perpetuating the employer-paid health care system a good thing? Why should I have to pay extra taxes so General Motors or Walmart can get a 35% discount on the care it provides for its employees if I can't get the same discount for coverage I buy myself? Why can't I pay my own insurance premium with pre-tax money like a corporation?
We absolutely need a level playing field between employer paid care and individually purchased care. Insurance companies need to compete for MY business, not he business of my employer. That wouldn't be a complete cure but it would do much more good than Obamacare's so called reforms that preserve the big business status quo with minor tweaks.
Why perpetuate this system?
Another good question.
1) Because it's all we've got and it's what we have to work with and
2) Because Americans don't have that much imagination any longer, it seems and
3) Because we haven't yet gotten corporate America, their lobbyists, the wealthy and all of these groups money out of our government, as we all know. Unless and until we do, big changes like what you're advocating won't happen.
I'm all for trashing our system and copying the successful ones from around the world that DO work.
But then you and a lot of people would scream "Socialism!", even though those systems work and are very successful for their respective citizens and patients.
I have to repeat here---check out the benefits of what you deride as "Obamacare" that have even already been passed:
If you are a young adult, you can now stay on your parents’ health plan until your 26th birthday, if you do not have coverage of your own.
If you are among 4 million eligible small businesses, you can receive tax credits if you choose to offer coverage to your employees – covering 35% of the cost of coverage.
If you are a child under age 19, you can no longer be denied coverage by an insurance company for having a “pre-existing condition.”
Your insurance company can no longer place a lifetime limit on your coverage. Such limits have caused some families to declare bankruptcy.
If you are a senior, you will now be receiving a 50% discount on brand-name drugs if you enter the Medicare Part D ‘donut hole’ coverage gap – a discount that grows until the ‘donut hole’ is closed in 2020.
You can no longer be dropped from coverage by your insurance company simply because you get sick.
Your insurance company can no longer place restrictive annual limits on your coverage – with annual limits completely eliminated by 2014.
If you are in a new plan, you now have free coverage of key preventive services, such as immunizations, mammograms, and other cancer screenings.
Your insurance company must now spend at least 80 percent of premiums on covering medical services – rather than administrative expenses, CEO pay, and profits.
Your insurance company must now publish on the Internet detailed justifications for any premium increasesthey are seeking that are more than 10 percent.
Healthcare will result in higher taxes, higher debt, rationing, and a lone healthcare czar accountabl¬e to no one, crushing burdens on small businesses¬, senior citizens losing their Medicare plans, higher premiums, and a potentiall¬y unconstitu¬tional mandate. All of this to redistribute wealth and manufactur¬e identical social and economic outcomes for everyone! I will never cease to be amazed by the complete insanity and lack of practicali¬ty.
Say what you want about health-care reform, but as with many other pieces of legislation that have been passed during the country’s recent economic hard times, we are getting some much-needed transparency on a number of personal finance issues.
So, Atlanta, it sounds--clearly and strongly--as though you're saying either we just shouldn't have health care, period, or we shouldn't try to fix it and we should leave it alone or there are no fixes, is that right? (and I'm not being sarcastic).
Do you have any fixes for this broken, absurdly-expensive health care system?
You realize the system is already rationing, right?
Where we start has little to do with which direction we should go. This is NOT fixing the problem, it is embedding it even worse--rewarding the 'greedy insurance companies' by making their product mandatory, and not even giving consumers a choice of which company to deal with.
But you're still apparently wedded to the notion that if employers pay, it won't affect the wages of their workers, and that workers can't be trusted to do the right thing, so they must be forced.
Sevesteen,
You have to read what I say and don't project either your opinion or your skepticism on what I write. You do that repeatedly and you've done it here, again.
Where we start has EVERYTHING to do with where we go UNLESS AND UNTIL, as I said, we truly THROW THE CORPORATIONS AND THEIR LOBBYISTS OUT OF THE DEBATE (not yelling, this is just for emphasis)--which we ought to do but won't--because that's how our system is set up right now. This is the system we've got and it's lousy, it doesn't work and we're tweaking it. In order to do it right and actually throw the health care corporate people out of the room and discuss what's truly best for America and not the companies, we'd have to suffer being called Socialists and Communists that are taking over the system. It just isn't going to happen.
If anyone is "still apparently wedded to the notion that if employers pay," it's not me. I'd like to dump the whole system but it isn't going to happen, as I keep saying, so this is what we get.
The current health care system is broken-I have never claimed otherwise. It manages to combine most of the drawbacks of both the free market system and government-run, with few of the benefits of either.
We need to go in a differnet direction--either move towards single payer or move towards true free market health care. We could even combine the two ideas sensibly--offer some sort of barely-adequate no-frills health care to everyone, with rebates to those who opt out and pay for their own health care.
Instead, we get Obamacare. Not a change of direction, but rather accelerating down the same path we have been on, benefiting the same people and not fixing any of the fundemental problems.
There is no good reason why the government should continue to make it cheaper to purchase health care through your employer, except that it benefits big businesses.
Well, that's great--we agree the system's broken, we agree it needs fixing/changing, we agree a single-payer idea might be good and I'd certainly be willing to look at some true "free-market" system, as long as it had competition in it for the insurance companies and other constraints--just guidelines all the providing companies involved in health care COULDN'T do, like cheat us, etc., seriously. But then, that might not be "free market" to you, I'm not sure.
We will always--in and on all subjects in government and society--get things that perpetuate status quos and benefit the system--corporations--as long as we don't fix our absurd, insane and imbalanced and unfair election and campaign system. Until it's fixed, corporations and the wealthy will always be able to give small amounts to their representatives in Congress and get whatever legislation suits them and not the American people. That's the long and short of it. We need to get them and their money out of our government. But the American people are either unaware of this or too lazy to do anything about it.
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