12/21/09: TWD's Agenda For The Day: Still A Lot Of Big Problems To Ignore

Joan McCarter's piece from yesterday clearly identifies the main problem with the current Senate bill that looks to be coming out of that "cooling center for democracy."

Bottom line, Americans are still going to be forced to buy insurance that for too many people will be unaffordable. As long as that's the case, and until there's a true alternative public option that provides people real choice, the insurance companies shouldn't get that one thing in the legislation they want: the mandate.

In that entire post, it highlights the good parts of what is in the Senate bill, but also how still severly flawed and inadequate it is.

The thing that is sticking out the most besides the lack of affordable coverage guaranteed (which there really isn't any at all in its current form) is this excise tax tax on families, a campaign policy that John McCain was ripped big time for in regards to how nutty and absurd it really was.

The harm this bill will do thanks to the excise tax on employer-provided insurance benefits is enormous. The health care bill is designed with the goal of making millions of middle class Americans’ health insurance coverage much worse. That is not a bug, it is a feature.

The excise tax is meant to force your employer to cut back your insurance benefits, reduce your coverage, and increase your co-pays and deductibles. This is not the conclusion of partisan think tanks, bloggers, or activists, this is the conclusion of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). They CBO concluded:[

A]n estimated 19 percent of workers with employment-based coverage would be affected by the excise tax in that year [2016]. Those individuals who kept their high-premium policies would pay a higher premium than under current law, with the difference in premiums roughly equal to the amount of the tax. However, CBO and JCT estimate that most people would avoid the cost of the excise tax by enrolling in plans that had lower premiums; those reductions would result from choosing plans that either pay a smaller share of covered health care costs (which would reduce premiums directly as well as indirectly by leading to less use of covered medical services), manage benefits more tightly, or cover fewer services.

Now unless employers will be willing to say, "I don't give a damn about this tax, I will still pay for quality health insurance for my workers,", your coverage from your employer in a middle class level (and maybe more) will get worse because of this key terrible characteristic of this bill.

Yet somehow, a terrific guy like Paul Krugman isn't getting into the heart of why he says this Senate bill is "seriously flawed", but yet wants it passed.

The facts just don't lead me to support a Senate bill that has some many problems in it for me. And it will be hard for the House bill to even stand up for it, especially with how the Stupak one is screaming to hijack the bill with his craziness.