I am pasting in this note from today’s thinkprogress blog because it explains why the bill still deserves a yes vote:
1. Largest Expansion Of Coverage Since Medicare’s Creation: Thirty-one million previously uninsured Americans will have insurance.
2. Low/Middle Income Americans Will Not Go Without Coverage: For low-income Americans struggling near the poverty line, the bill represents the largest single expansion of Medicaid since its inception. Combined with subsidies for middle income families, the bill’s provisions will ensure that working class Americans will no longer go without basic health care coverage.
3. Insurance Companies Will Never Be Able to Drop or Deny You Coverage Because You Are Sick: Insurers can no longer deny coverage because of a pre-existing condition. They can’t rescind coverage or impose lifetime or annual limits on care. Significantly, the bill also ends insurer discrimination against women — who currently pay as much as 48% more for coverage than men — and gives them access preventive services with no cost sharing.
4. Lowers Premiums For Families: The Senate bill could lower premiums for the overall population by 8.4%. For the subsidized population, premiums would decrease even more dramatically. According to the CBO, “the amount that subsidized enrollees would pay for non-group coverage would be roughly 56 percent to 59 percent lower, on average than the nongroup premiums charged under current law.”
5. Invests in Keeping People Healthy: The bill creates a Prevention and Public Health Fund to expand and sustain funding for public prevention programs that prevent disease and promote wellness.
6. Insurers Can’t Offer Subprime Health Care: Insurers operating in the individual and small group markets will no longer sell subprime policies that deny coverage when illness strikes and you need it most. Everyone will be offered an essential benefits package of comprehensive benefits.
7. Helps Businesses Afford Coverage: Small employers can take advantage of large risk pools by purchasing coverage through the bill’s state-based exchanges. Employers with no more than 25 employees would receive a tax credit to help them provide coverage to their employees. The bill also establishes a temporary reinsurance program for employers providing coverage to retirees over the age of 55 who are not eligible for Medicare.
8. Improves Medicare: The bill eliminates the waste and fraud in the Medicare system, gets rid of the special subsidy to private insurers participating in Medicare Advantage and extends the life of the Medicare trust fund by 9 years. It also closes the doughnut hole that affected 3.4 seniors enrolled in Medicare Part D in 2008.
9. Reduces The Deficit: Not only would the bill expand coverage to 30 million Americans without adding to the nation debt, it would also reduce the deficit by up to $409 billion over 10 years.
10. Reduces National Health Spending: A CAP-Commonwealth Fund analysis concludes the bill could reduce overall spending by close to $683 billion over 10 years – with the potential to save families $2,500. Even the most conservative government estimates conclude that the bill would reduce national health care expenditures by at least 0.3% by 2019.
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I say kill it
It turns out that insurance companies, in the fine print, can charge 300% more for older folks than they can for younger folks. Please Eleanor, do your homework and look at how this is a pay off for the insurance industry and big Pharma. The best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill, go back to the House, start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.
We don’t have to win just to lose again.
This is a protectionist bill written by and for the insurance companies. It has specific provisions that the GOP has been promoting for years that allow them to cross state lines to do business in state’s whose insurance commissions had previously banned them. Washington is one of these. There are also portions of the bill that will allow the companies to charge double premiums to patients with medical histories without restrictions- it is the trade-off when we told them they could no longer cancel coverage because of pre-existing conditions. The argument here is that we can always fine-tune this later to add the Americans that have been left out, etc. 44 years ago, Medicare was formed, under the promise that we could make adjustments to cover more people more effectively, but the conservatives have stood in the way of that kind of progress from the beginning.
This bill allows the for-profit sick-care system now in place to make more money and give sub-standard care.
It’s single-payer, non-profit Medicare for every American, or we continue to lag behind the rest of the world.
Everyone from Wendall Potter, Markos Moulitsas, Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean and Keith Olbermann, who has promised to break the law if the imposed mandate to buy is implemented. Even John Stewart is skeptical
Streeter….were you drunk when you did that last post??
You need to buy a verb.
The Senate is the least unrepresentative body in government, it drowns in corporate largesse, is tied up in its own rules, and is led by a vulnerable man who has had to call the shots based on his personal reelection prospects. Cohesion and procedural unanimity within the Democratic caucus does not exist and the realm of the possible is diminished as a result. The vast majority of Democrats will be dissatisfied with the bill which Reid is about to unveil. I certainly will be as unhappy as Drew and Streeter.
Over a month ago I sent messages to Congress explaining the advantages of an early buy-in to Medicare as a cost bending approach and as a way to get some people to retire earlier and thereby put more jobs out there for the unemployed. It is too bad about Lieberman’s change of heart.
I have always opposed tiered pricing, low rates for some and extraordinarily high rates for riskier/older/female. Tiered pricing is the hallmark of monopolistic practice. The place to attack it is in the House-Senate conference.
We really should go on now and not turn back, get what we can get, get more in the conference, and press for more later.
Sorry. I meant to write “least representative body”
I can’t wait to get all my free shit…
one wonders when the unlimited greed and hypocrisy of our government elected officials and the corporations they serve will ever be contained? (Lieberman is a prime example). The very first sentence in the preamble to the constitution states that it is the duty of the government to provide for the general welfare(read general health care) of its citizens. Yet, the opposition of universal health care that every industrial government except for the U.S. already provides is some how considered an attack on their freedom which is contrary to the preamble which sets the general intent of the constitution. It is noted by the way the same opposition will scream like stuck pigs if one were to suggest some reasonable form of gun control such as eliminating the saturday night specials and assault rifles. Is this not the use of very selective constitutional interpretation to serve one’s own agenda?
When has the Grand Old Party ever offered any meaningful alternatives to the health care mess we now have? We can spend a trillion dollars on the most senseless of all wars in the middle east but can’t fund health care for its own citizens.
Well done, mgunder…but the cons have been offering their “alternative” for some time: Work harder. Work longer. Get a third job. Put your children to work, And instead of having your spouse making dinner for the family, make sure she’s holding down at least one minimum wage job, too. This from the party of “family values”.
Wow..the Little Woodchuck Socialist Democratic Manifesto is about worn out…Y’all git a new copy for Christmas?
Still no more takers on the election next year?
I’m not surprised. Even Hector ran away.
Yes, I’m sure Neal’ Log Cabin group is celebrating.
I’m sure that many are ready to say, “pass something, this has been an unbearable wait (and weight,) watching pols obstruct and conjure ghostly reasons for not serving the American people with sensible health care.”
And then today, the topper. McConnell, said “The Democrats are trying to rush this bill out before Christmas.” This issue has been debated and debated for most of the last two Congressional sessions. you are a fool McConnell, if you think that the people feel you are being rushed.
I commend any Republican who has said, “I won’t vote for this because it is not in the interest of the people.” But mostly what we have heard, is “I won’t vote for this because it was brought to the floor by a Democrat.” Now Nelson is holding up the entire Congress by posing his moral opposition to abortion–well, OK, the man has to vote his conviction. But, tell me this Mr. and Mrs. Congress, when are we going to care for not only the fetus, but the person that follows, with good health care and a sensible respect for his livlihood, until he departs from this life? There is no need to care for a fetus, if the person that follows is left to rot in poverty and health-care system that eats his mind, body and mentality until he is less than human–why did you save that fetus for a life that is misery and hardscrabble. Why?
Is it personal conviction, or the fact that the insurance companies will cut him off at the pockets if he doesn’t do what they say?
Neal, as usual, I see you have your alternatives ready to go.
I still can’t wait to get my free shit..