2013
Just when you think you heard it all, more dribble from the left appears.
Read what I put in bold, “allow people to retain current, substandard individual policies, and renew them next year even if they don’t provide the basic coverage required by the Affordable Care Act.”
ALLOW? BASIC COVERAGE REQUIRED BY THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT? Who the hell is anyone in Washington or The New York Times to say what coverage is right for anyone else ESPECIALLY when everyone has a choice of different even better coverage if they want it? What pompous asses!
In addition, if a person is in reasonably good health, that catastrophic policy is not a bad deal with a premium of only $40.84 a month. If you wanted to you could self-fund most routine care with what you saved in premiums. Oh my, you would have to pay 20% of the bill … you mean like Medicare and the policies that were in effect in employer plans up until the 1970s? Clearly this type of policy is not for everyone and it would not be a good thing to force people into such a policy, but that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about choice and competition and affordability, everything the progressives have been talking about. The attitude displayed by the Rosenthals of the world is exactly why affordability under Obamacare is a myth.
November 15, 2013, 3:44 pm
Cutting the Heart Out of Health Reform
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
It’s easy to be mad at President Obama over health care reform – the broken website, the confusing choices, his false promise that everyone could keep their current plans.
But it’s still hard to fathom why 39 Democrats voted for a bill in the House that would allow people to retain current, substandard individual policies, and renew them next year even if they don’t provide the basic coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. (You have to wonder, to start, whether they actually read the act before they voted for it, the same question I’d like to ask of Mr. Obama and his team. The changed requirements were in that law.)
Perhaps it was just a protest vote, a freebie based on the lawmakers’ certainty that the Senate will never take up or pass this ridiculous bill. But did those Democrats know what they were voting for this time around?
It’s impossible to accept the votes as a desire to fix the particular problem of people who got cancellation notices for individual plans.
For one thing, if those people could not get on the federal exchange, they might have been able to go to state-run exchanges but live in states where Republican governors refused to set them up. For another, the bill passed by the House today on a vote of 261-157 is not about providing a temporary fix. It is intended to cut the heart out of the health care reform program by allowing people to go on buying substandard policies next year.
Many of those policies are an illusion with catastrophically high deductibles and out-of-pocket spending ceilings. Take the insurance that the right-wing group Generation Opportunity was hawking last month. As Juliet Lapidos wrote here on Oct. 28, the $40.84 a month plan did not cover office visits for primary care doctors or specialists. It has a $10,000 a year deductible and if you ended up in the emergency room, you would have had to pay 20 percent of the bill after the deductible. The same applied to outpatient surgery and hospitalization.
There’s another word for that – bankruptcy.
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