The Republican Party claim they too want health care reform and that they too have a plan. Back on June 17th they announced that plan.
Minority Leader John Boehner, left, said they would take the current system and improve it by reforming Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said "we believe we can come up with a plan where every person in the uninsured has access to insurance."
The four-page Republican health care outline lays out a plan that would allow states, associations and small businesses to pool together to offer health insurance. It would give tax credits to low and modest income Americans to help them buy health insurance. It would also let dependents under twenty-five stay on their parent's health insurance.
The plan also stipulates some of the following:
To lower the costs of health care, the Republican plan includes:
Tax credits
Creates incentives to save now for future and long-term health care needs by
improving health savings accounts and flexible spending arrangements as well as
creating new tax benefits to offset the cost of long-term care premiums.
Sounds like they hope your buy your own nursing home care as well. You can’t afford normal health care yet they are asking that you pay for your own end of life care?
Provides flexibility to Medicaid and SCHIP beneficiaries by allowing them to apply the value of their benefit to a health plan that better meets their needs than the onesize- fits-all government program
.
Isn’t that what you would call in the education environment – a voucher? Are they giving you a voucher to go buy your own plan instead of relying on Medicaid and SCHIP? Are they saving ‘you’ money here?
Would somebody tell me how this plan helps to LOWER health care costs for the consumers/patients? Can anybody show me how it ‘reforms’ the insurance and medical profession? This plan is reforming the patient, not the doctors or insurance bureaucrats’.
They want ‘you’ to improve yourself, you to pay for your own families health care-- even if you can’t afford it.
This plan sounds more like a typical Republican giveaway to the wealthiest among us. If you have insurance, you’ll get yet another tax deduction. If you can ‘prove’ you are taking ‘care’ of yourself with weight management, by quitting smoking and/or drinking and you are managing your diabetes, you’ll get a tax credit. If you take your ailing mom, dad, grandma and grandpa into your home instead of placing them into a nice medically safe environment like a nursing home or assisted living arrangement, you’ll get another tax deduction.
Creates incentives to save now for future and long-term health care needs by
improving health savings accounts and flexible spending arrangements as well as
creating new tax benefits to offset the cost of long-term care premiums.
Encourages home care and independence for patients rather than forcing individuals into institutionalized settings.
Gives financial help to caregivers who provide in-home care for a loved one
It also appears that they are planning on creating a committee to influence the decisions that you and your doctor make about your health care. The following statement implies that doctors will no longer need to provide ‘necessary’ medical testing because the Republican Party will have written legislation to stop patients from being able to sue those doctors and nurses that don’t do their jobs correctly.
Implements comprehensive medical liability reform that will reduce costly,
unnecessary defensive medicine practiced by doctors trying to protect themselves from overzealous trial lawyers.
Rewards high-quality care, instead of encouraging health care providers to order more and unnecessary services.
Who decides what is necessary?
The plan, like the Democratic Party’s plan, will help patients decide what the best way to manage their health care is, from day you are born to the day you are die. Will they too provide access to living will information as well (Death Panels)? It also appears to allow Medicare and Medicaid to stop what ‘they’ call wasted services. Who decides what is waste and abuse; a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk that has never even met you?
Improve Americans’ lives through effective prevention, wellness, and disease
management programs, while developing new treatments and cures for life threatening diseases.
Provides Medicare and Medicaid with additional authority and resources to stop waste, fraud, and abuse
All these tax incentives imply that you make enough money to buy an insurance policy to begin with and do nothing about the rising costs of health care.
Where is their plan to cut the cost of health care? Read between the lines folks. They aren’t cutting ‘our’ costs for health care, nor are they reforming the medical and health insurance industry of ‘their’ abuse and fraud. They are actually increasing our costs and helping the medical and insurance industry by lowering costs for coverage of a patient by requiring less of the medical profession.
They want you to pay for all your health care (giving you a modest tax deduction). They want you to pay for your entire parent’s end of life care and your own end of life care with some provided wellness, and disease management programs (Bureaucrat decision makers and death panels?). They want to cut Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIPP costs by cutting services to children, seniors and the disabled and forcing you to pay for those services yourself.
They are simply cutting the costs to the medical and insurance industry by stopping UNECESSARY medical procedures, getting less nursing home patients to pay for and offering parents the ability to pay for a big chunk of their child’s health care (pay for your kids insurance till they are 25? – your premiums will go up, not down), even if they can’t afford it -- by offering you a ‘voucher’.
The Republican Party wants to reform YOU and ME (even more so, than the Democratic Party does) --- not the insurance or medical profession.
Where is the beef? In what way are we, the consumer, saving money?
Congress tells us that unless reform is done, our cost for health insurance will cost us half of our income within 10 years. In what way will our costs for health insurance decrease in the next ten to fifteen years with what we’re being offered by members in Congress?
Republicans have always pushed ‘competition’ as being the best solution for lowering costs for things like Social Security, Medicare and prescription drug plans. Why are they now refusing to provide that same sort of competition within the health insurance industry?