By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer Erica Werner, Associated Press Writer –
WASHINGTON – House Democrats reached agreement Wednesday on key elements of a health care bill that would vastly alter America’s medical landscape, requiring virtually universal sign-ups and establishing a new government-run insurance option for millions.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned a formal announcement Thursday morning in front of the Capitol. Lawmakers said the legislation could be up for a vote on the House floor next week.
The rollout will cap months of arduous negotiations to bridge differences between liberal and moderate Democrats and blend health care overhaul bills passed by three separate committees over the summer. The developments in the House came as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., tried to round up support among moderate Democrats for his bill, which includes a modified government insurance option that states could opt out of.
Reid met Wednesday with Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who faces a potentially tough re-election next year.
The final product in the House, reflecting many of President Barack Obama’s priorities, includes new requirements for employers to offer insurance to their workers or face penalties, fines on Americans who don’t purchase coverage and subsidies to help lower-income people do so. Insurance companies would face new prohibitions against charging much more to older people or denying coverage to people with health conditions.
Pelosi has also said the bill would strip the health insurance industry of a long-standing exemption from antitrust laws covering market allocation, price fixing and bid rigging.
The price tag, topping $1 trillion over 10 years, would be paid for by taxing high-income people and cutting some $500 billion in payments to Medicare providers. The legislation would extend health coverage to around 95 percent of Americans.
Republicans criticized the bill even before it was unveiled.
“Americans’ health care is too important to risk on one gigantic bill that was negotiated behind closed doors,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich. “The Medicare cuts will hurt seniors, the tax increases will kill jobs and the government takeover of health care will increase premium costs.”
One change expected to be revealed Thursday is that some of the provisions of the bill, which were set to take effect mostly in 2013, have been moved up so Americans would see the benefits of the legislation more quickly, according to Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami.
“I’m pretty confident that we’ve got the right pieces in place,” said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, one of the three panels involved in writing the bill. “We can quibble over parts of it, but the fact is when you’re taking a 60-year-old system that grew up in a rather haphazard fashion and you’re trying to bring some coherence to it, these are sort of the things you have to do at the beginning of that process.”
Plenty of work remains to be done before a bill could land on Obama’s desk — and there’s still no guarantee that Congress can complete the legislation before year’s end, as the president wants. If Obama does sign a health overhaul bill, he will have bucked decades of failed attempts by past administrations, most recently by former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
House leaders hope to finish the bill before Veteran’s Day, Nov. 11. The Senate is aiming to start debate sometime in the next several weeks.
Bills passed by the House and Senate would have to be merged before a final product could be sent to Obama, and there are a number of differences between the two chambers that would have to be reconciled. Among them are the different approaches to the public plan. The House does not include the opt-out provision for states, and it has more stringent requirements for employers. The Senate would use a tax on high-value insurance plans to pay for the bill, an approach that the House version doesn’t have.
In the end, Pelosi, D-Calif., and other House leaders were unable to round up the necessary votes for their preferred version of the government insurance plan — one that would base payment rates to providers on rates paid by Medicare. Instead, the Health and Human Services secretary would negotiate rates with providers, the approach preferred by moderates and the one that will be featured in the Senate’s version.
That marked a defeat for liberal lawmakers, who argued for months that a public insurance plan tied to Medicare would save more money for the government, and offer cheaper rates to consumers. Moderates feared that doctors, hospitals and other providers, particularly those in rural states, would be hurt, and in the end they looked poised to prevail, despite constituting a distinct minority in the 256-member House Democratic caucus.
Some liberals were prepared to accept the negotiated rate structure. Others were still withholding support, even while pointing to Reid’s inclusion of a government insurance plan in the Senate bill as a victory in itself.
“We were laughed at in August. Who would have thought that the Senate bill would have a public option?” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Woolsey was noncommittal about whether progressives would accept the negotiated rates. “This is not walkaway time and it is not acceptance time,” Woolsey said.
Members of the progressive caucus, along with lawmakers from the black, Hispanic and Asian-Pacific American caucuses, were scheduled to meet with Obama at the White House on Thursday, she said.
The legislation would set up a new purchasing exchange where small businesses and individuals without affordable health care options could shop for and compare insurance plans. The new public plan would be one offered in the exchange, and it would be optional; an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office of early versions of the bill said that the public plan would be expected to cover 9 million to 10 million people by 2019.
The House plan also envisions a significant expansion of Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for low income people.
Democratic leaders still faced disputes over prohibiting taxpayer money for abortions and health care for illegal immigrants, issues they hoped to resolve after the bill’s unveiling.
Sen. Reid’s Government Run Plan is a Stalking Horse for Real Plan
The real plan is bad enough!
What an actor! Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid presented his idea (we still haven’t seen the bill which he wrote in secret) for a government run health plan that had an “opt out” provision with a straight face. But the idea is such a joke, it’s difficult to see how anyone took the idea seriously. What state would consent to see their citizens taxed to pay for the health benefits in another state?
Reid knows that there are not 60 votes in the Senate for a government run health plan. It’s also unlikely that he’ll upset the wishes of his own members and force the bill through to the floor with the legislative move known as reconciliation.
So what is really going on?
I’ve warned throughout this farce that the Dems will push the more extreme version of health care “reform” knowing full well it cannot pass. To do otherwise would upset their fringe left wing supporters who demand an immediate government takeover of America’s health care so they can start telling the rest of us how to live. The Dem’s real goal is to stake out territory on the extreme left then be shown to “compromise” by backing the less radical plan closer to that put forward by the Senate Finance Committee. When that happens expect the trumpets to sound, the clouds to part and the Dem’s allies in the “news” media to announce how wonderful it is that Dems have shown such incredible flexibility. Heck, they might even persuade Maine’s Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) to get back on board and declare the entire undertaking a bipartisan triumph!
Everyone would be so relieved that the full out government option had been defeated that they would sign off on Obama Care. By the time reality sets in it would be too late.
Reality of the Dem’s “Moderate” Plan: Higher Taxes, Higher Insurance Costs!
A new study by the Insurance company Wellpoint, which operates Blue Cross plans in several states shows that rates will rise much faster under Obama Care than they would if no new legislation were passed:
The WellPoint Revelation
Private insurance premiums could triple under ObamaCare.
Wall Street Journal
OCTOBER 28, 2009Washington is captivated by the Senate melodrama over the so-called public option, salivating at the ring of Harry Reid’s political bell (see below). But the most important health-care questions continue to be about the policy substance—particularly those that Democrats don’t want asked.
Foremost among them is: How will ObamaCare affect insurance premiums in the private health-care markets? Despite indignant Democratic denials, the near-certainty is that their plan will cause costs to rise across the board. The latest data on this score come from a series of state-level studies from the insurance company WellPoint Inc.
At the request of Congressional delegations worried about their constituents—call it a public service—WellPoint mined its own actuarial data to model ObamaCare in the 14 states where it runs Blue Cross plans. The study therefore takes into account market and demographic differences that other industry studies have not, such as the one from the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, which looked at aggregate national trends.
In all of the 14 states WellPoint scrutinized, ObamaCare would drive up premiums for the small businesses and individuals who are most of WellPoint’s customers.
…
the Wellpoint study is its detailed rigor. Take Ohio, where a young, healthy 25-year-old living in Columbus can purchase insurance from WellPoint today for about $52 per month in the individual market. WellPoint’s actuaries calculate the bill will rise to $79 because Democrats are going to require it to issue policies to anyone who applies, even if they’ve waited until they’re sick to buy insurance. Then they’ll also require the company to charge everyone nearly the same rate, bringing the premium to $134. Add in an extra $17, since Democrats will require higher benefit levels, and a share of the new health industry taxes ($6), and monthly premiums have risen to $157, a 199% boost.Meanwhile, a 40-year-old husband and wife with two kids would see their premiums jump by 122%—to $737 from $332—while a small business with eight employees in Franklin County would see premiums climb by 86%. It’s true that the family or the individual might qualify for subsidies if their incomes are low enough, but the business wouldn’t qualify under the Senate Finance bill WellPoint examined. And even if there are subsidies, the new costs the bill creates don’t vaporize. They’re merely transferred to taxpayers nationwide—or financed with deficits, which will be financed eventually with higher taxes.
The story is largely the same from state to state, though the increases are smaller in the few states that have already adopted the same mandates and regulations that Democrats want to impose on all states. For the average small employer in high-cost New York, for instance, premiums would only rise by 6%. But they’d shoot up by 94% for the same employer in Indianapolis, 91% in St. Louis and 53% in Milwaukee.
A family of four with average health in those same cities would all face cost increases of 122% buying insurance on the individual market. And it’s important to understand that these are merely the new costs created by ObamaCare—not including the natural increases in medical costs over time from new therapies and the like.
If you would like to read a detailed analysis of the rising costs in the 14 states Wellpoint studied, you may read more here.
Democrats didn’t even bother to read Wellpoint’s report before they attacked with many of the same talking points they have used to demonize any and all critics throughout this debate. They have yet to call them racists, but I’m sure that was just an oversight.
Meanwhile, we are all talking about Reid’s big gamble and his joke of the opt-out provision of a government run option that he and his fellow Dems know will never become law. Will we be so relieved when Reid relents that we swallow the massive premium increases and taxes in the more “moderate” bill?
And what happens when insurance costs do skyrocket? Won’t there be another huge push for a government run plan? Oh happy day!
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