If the bill is as bad as Howard Dean tells us – and I think Dean has some credibility on this issue – then the right thing to do would be to kill the bill. It would be interesting to see if Obama would be willing to veto it if it passed. That would be interesting theater, but I suppose everyone in the Democratic Party would prefer to not pass anything than for that to happen. But intelligent criticism of the bill appears to indicate that it might make things worse rather than better.
My inclination would be to attempt to go back to the November elections and get the few more votes that were needed. And of course, being a pamphleteer at heart, I would turn this into a moral issue and go for the throat, as I hear people are now doing with Joe Lieberman, saying he will be personally “causing” thousands of deaths. For me the unacceptable cases are the medically related bankruptcies. If I were Obama I’d round up a stadium-full of people who have been through this, and unleash them on every Republican senator. Surely some Republican voters are Christians? Who don’t believe that men should have to sell their children’s home to pay for their wife’s cancer hospitalization? Who know that greed is a sin and not a virtue?
But if it’s merely about making us all sign up with another corporation, it’s useless to me. What will happen to a person like myself who had an income of about $1000 in 2009? What does a mandate to buy insurance mean to such person?
3 Comments
Hear, hear!
John, I couldn’t disagree more. Yes, the bill coulda-shoulda been better. But even the bill as currently standing in the Senate does a lot of important things.
First of all, every state would have a single website that would guide you to enrolling in a health insurance plan, figuring out which of the options below you’d be eligible for, and allowing you to apply & enroll right from the website.
Most likely, you would be eligible for Medicaid. Both the House and Senate bills would make Medicaid available to basically everyone with income below 133% of the poverty level. Currently, you have to belong to one of various groups (pregnant women, disabled, parents of young children) to be eligible; both bills would simply make everyone below the line eligible.
Under New York’s Medicaid program, you pay nothing for a visit to a private doctor’s or dentist’s office; $3 for a visit to a community health center; $3 for each brand name prescription; $1 for generic prescriptions; and $25 for an extended hospital stay of any length. There’s an annual copay cap of $200, so once you had paid that much in a year, you would pay nothing for any additional services.
Depending on whether you had had any insurance recently, you might also be eligible to purchase health insurance from an exchange, which would contain a variety of plans from private insurers. Other eligible individuals and small businesses would also be buying plans on these exchanges. If you were eligible and chose this route, the government would subsidize your premiums; you might pay as much as $50/month for the insurance.
Either of these would be dramatically better than you not having insurance at all.
All of this would take several years to kick in, of course, so it wouldn’t get you health insurance in 2010. But not passing a bill won’t get you health insurance in 2010, or 2015.
Aaron, you may well be right here. I’ve always admired Obama’s incrementalism and willingness to compromise, whereas my inborn tendency is to say, “I want it the way I want it and no other way.”
But I must say, there will be political blowback if this bill 1) makes people buy health insurance without guarding against price-gauging with a captive market 2) makes people (like myself) sign up for programs (like Medicaid) which have the feel of going on welfare. It’d be much better just to get the money for the programs from income taxes and have people fill out the paperwork when they’re in the hospital.
One way or another – I’m glad I don’t have Obama’s job.