Several weeks ago I hosted an OFA health care party. One of the people who attended was an elderly conservative woman that has stayed in touch with me since. She remains very skeptical of the current health care plan forming in congress, and that is not helped by the emails she continually receives from her other conservative friends. Fortunately, she knows I've been pouring through the actual text of HR3200, so she has been forwarding some of these messages to me and I have been responding with my interpretation of what the bill actually says. Read on after the flip to see the latest thing that she forwarded and how I responded to it.
Here is the bit that I responded to. This evidently originated at IBD Editorials:
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, July 15, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Congress: It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:
"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
And here is my respone:
Yes, I've seen this section. They are misinterpreting what they are reading. It is not blocking people from enrolling in private insurance. What it says is that insurance companies can not add new members to old plans that existed before the law goes into effect. Otherwise insurance companies could get around new regulations by just expanding existing plans.
These things must be read in context. The text they refer to is in subsection (a) of Section 102 called "GRANDFATHERED HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE DEFINED". When it talks of limiting enrollment, it is referring only to those policies that existed before HR3200 goes into effect and continue to exist even though they do not follow the new rules. This is done specifically so people can stay in their existing policy. Insurance companies can still create new policies, but they must follow the new rules. People are free to switch polices, but it must be to one of the policies that follows the new rules.
The new rules placed on insurance companies would be:
- They can no longer deny people insurance because they have pre-existing conditions.
- They can no longer drop people's insurance when they get sick.
- Customers will have to pay no more than $5000 (individual) or $10000 (family) in out-of-pocket costs like co-pays and deductibles in any one year.
- There will be no lifetime cap on how much care the insurance company pays for.
Let me explain why many people think this is a good thing. Right now, insurance companies are able to cancel insurance policies if they choose to. They claim that it is rare and only 0.5% are ever canceled... but that is actually a lot. Think of it this way. Most people never make really large claims on their insurance, so the insurance company has no reason to cancel them. But most of the expense for the insurance company comes from one percent of their customers who end up getting a really expensive illness or injury. These are the people who get canceled. So really, its not that you have 0.5% chance of having your insurance canceled, its more like a 50/50 chance of having it canceled when you seriously need it.
That is what happened to my girlfriend. She had insurance. She was injured. It was canceled.
There is one major group of people in this country at no risk of having their insurance canceled: People old enough to be in Medicare. This is true even if you have a private Medicare Advantage policy. That is because the government mandates that insurance companies meet certain standards, such as providing at least the same benefits as Medicare, never dropping coverage, and capping various expenses. If this sounds a lot like what I described above, that is because the current health care bill borrows heavily from the example of Medicare and its partnership with private insurance.
I hope this was helpful.
I've seen at lot disinformation floating around the web from people who have claimed to have read HR3200 and found horrors hiding within. This has lead to the ironic scenes of teabaggers shouting "read the bill!" at some of the congress people who WROTE the bill. These wingnuts are no doubt reading summaries like those found at the Liberty Council web site and now consider themselves experts on a bill they've never actually looked at.
I have no doubt that the teabaggers will never be convinced of the truth even if we stuff the actual text of the bill under their noses and force them to read it, but some otherwise intelligent and persuadable people can be taken in by these lies, so I think it is important to counter them. To that end, I am currently pouring through HR3200 and creating an annotated version that directly addresses all the ridiculous claims I've come across. A list of false claims will include links to the parts of the bill that disprove it with notes and additional links to explain the text. I'm about half done, though it would go faster if I had the bill in raw text form or at least had a way to convert from PDF while preserving the line numbers and indentation.
Comments and suggestions are appreciated.