Talking points on HR 3962 with some comparisons to the Senate (Reid) bill in bold.
By Ida Hellander, MD
Nov. 20, 2009Overall -
• The House bill is completely inadequate in expanding coverage and controlling costs. It is essentially an insurance industry bailout. Most provisions to expand coverage don’t even go into effect until 2013 (2014 in the Senate), after which it still leaves at least 17 million Americans uninsured.
The Senate bill would have even less impact, leaving at least 24 million Americans uninsured.• It forgoes over $400 billion annually in potential savings on overhead and bureaucracy in the health system – enough to cover all 47 million uninsured – by retaining profit-driven private health insurers instead of replacing them with a streamlined, more efficient, Medicare for All system.
• It makes private health insurance mandatory for middle-income working people, forcing them to buy a defective product. It will become a federal crime to be uninsured, with a penalty of 2.5 percent of income, starting in 2013.
The fines in the Senate bill are lower, starting at $95 in 2014 and rising to $750 by 2019.• Families of very modest means, at 200-400 percent of poverty, will be required to spend an unaffordable 8-12 percent of their incomes on insurance premiums if they don’t have employer-sponsored coverage. Additionally, the basic benefits are very skimpy and the cost-sharing requirements are high, meaning that families of very modest means could spend 20 percent or more of their incomes on premiums and cost-sharing before receiving any benefits.
In the Senate, the lowest-cost plan would only cover 60 percent of health care costs.• A Medicaid expansion will cover more low-income Americans, but coverage gains – both in Medicaid and for people receiving tax assistance to buy coverage - will be short-lived because the cost is unsustainable as we’ve seen in several states that have attempted reform in recent years.
• The insurance industry hijacked the process: Private insurers get millions of mandatory new customers and $605 billion in taxpayer subsidies. This will have the effect of making the health insurance lobby even more powerful, and more able to hijack political processes in the future.
The Senate bill provides $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies to insurers.•
To pay for subsidies to insurers, the bill cuts payments to safety net hospitals that serve a large number of low-income patients. The Senate bill cuts payments to safety-net hospitals by $43 billion.http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/talking-points-on-hr-3962-with-some-comparisons-to-the-senate-reid-bill-in-bold
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