Hits & Misses – 2009/6/16
Hatch on the Kennedy bill: it's "the most liberal bunch of gobbledygook I've seen in my life – a complete liberal mishmash of ideas."
Four reasons why Obama's health plan will increase health care costs.
National Kidney Foundation: "compensating donors would cheapen the gift."
Hatch should call it Massachusttes liberal gobbledygook.
That four reasons article suggests that consumers can buy out of state health insurance and be charged out of state rates. That’s not true. The consumers’ rates are determined by which zip code they live in.
It’s depressing when a 16-year-old girl is dumped by her boyfriend. I think we should limit her depression management mental benefits at $100,000 or $250,000. No lifetime cap on mental services is just asking for trouble. Mental health parity is just another part of the liberal gobbledygook.
Kennedy’s flavor of Socialized Medicine is a giant Blue Cross bailout from coast to coast.
The state of North Carolina is selling their own employees Blue Cross as we speak. Their open enrollment is July 1, 2009. Blue Cross costs $504 a month to add the spouse on the employee’s coverage. HSA coverage is half that cost in the free and open market. But of course the Blue Cross coverage is purchased with pre-tax dollars.
Blue Cross will never maintain their market share on their employer-based plans without a massive intervention by the federal government.
Blue Cross owns Senator Kennedy.
See how much of the state market share your Blue Cross owns. Here is an interactive competition map of the USA.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/06/health_competition_map.html
Senator Kennedy rides shotgun for Blue Cross.
I’m trilled to see that Fortune, truly a mainstream media magazine, has opined that community rating increases premiums. I have just finished an interview on KQED-AM, the Bay Area’s largest NPR affiliate radio station, where a woman called in to complain that her health insurer treated her pregnancy as a pre-existing condition. She had to pay $1,200 for ob-gyn services.
Assuming that this was, in fact, the truth (and she didn’t indicate that the insurer got it wrong), then it took a lot of cojones to complain that the insurer wouldn’t pay for an consultation she had scheduled before she even bought the policy!
Indeed, since pregnancy is hardly “accidental” (in most cases) I’d lean towards having the parents pay all ordinary costs of pregnancy and childbirth, with insurance only kicking in if something goes wrong.
I’d heard that the Kennedy plan included modified community rating, but didn’t know it was banded 2:1. I’d thought the norm was more like 5:1. Either way it’s no surprise– I think it’s a given that any Democratic proposal is going to include mandates for some sort of community rating and guaranteed issue, along with a personal mandate. And it probably will have a good chance of passing this time, after they throw diversions like the public option overboard a week or so before the vote.
It’s not what I would have wanted. Tying the above to a tax credit rather than making them mandatory would have been more palatable and self-limiting. But I haven’t seen anyone attempt to short circuit the process by advancing a middle-of-the-road proposal.