Cutting the Heart Out of Health Reform
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL, NYT
It’s easy to be mad at President Obama over health care reform – the broken website, the confusing choices, his false promise that everyone could keep their current plans.
But it’s still hard to fathom why 39 Democrats voted for a bill in the House that would allow people to retain current, substandard individual policies, and renew them next year even if they don’t provide the basic coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. (You have to wonder, to start, whether they actually read the act before they voted for it, the same question I’d like to ask of Mr. Obama and his team. The changed requirements were in that law.)
Perhaps it was just a protest vote, a freebie based on the lawmakers’ certainty that the Senate will never take up or pass this ridiculous bill. But did those Democrats know what they were voting for this time around?
It’s impossible to accept the votes as a desire to fix the particular problem of people who got cancellation notices for individual plans.
(More here.)
It’s easy to be mad at President Obama over health care reform – the broken website, the confusing choices, his false promise that everyone could keep their current plans.
But it’s still hard to fathom why 39 Democrats voted for a bill in the House that would allow people to retain current, substandard individual policies, and renew them next year even if they don’t provide the basic coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. (You have to wonder, to start, whether they actually read the act before they voted for it, the same question I’d like to ask of Mr. Obama and his team. The changed requirements were in that law.)
Perhaps it was just a protest vote, a freebie based on the lawmakers’ certainty that the Senate will never take up or pass this ridiculous bill. But did those Democrats know what they were voting for this time around?
It’s impossible to accept the votes as a desire to fix the particular problem of people who got cancellation notices for individual plans.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
So, if your Congressman is one of these 39 Democrats who voted for that mess today, you might want to ask why.
Is anyone going to forward this post to Tim Walz ?
The autopsy of why the Republicans increased their House advantage in the 2014 elections will point to the November 15th House vote … when 39 Dems voted YES on the “IF your insurance agent likes you, he may keep you” Act.
The question of "Did you read the bill ?", is the right one ... it does not require insurance companies to renew policies but it does allow them to write policies for new customers … and it is for one year.
The timing is perfect.
October 15th … just weeks before the election, insurance companies will announce their new pricing plans sold under the exchanges starting in January (two months after the election) … previously, they assumed that these cancelled policies would force healthy consumers into the exchanges … but now, they can stay out. For the insurance companies, that will be permission to raise prices on the exchange.
Think about it … you bought a policy under the exchange and now you find out that next year that your policy cost will increase … meanwhile, others will get notices saying that the one-year fix, will cause those policies to be cancelled, so you can now enter the exchange and purchase a higher priced policy.
Politically Walz’s vote was unnecessary as it was already assured of passage … and it makes no sense … he should have said, “I voted for an alternative that would have fixed the problem (that would give insurance companies the option to continue offering Affordable Care Act non-compliant plans though 2014 to current enrollees only, as long as those plans were in effect as of October 1, 2013) but the Republicans defeated it.” He should have required a hearing with insurance companies and state commissioners called saying what could be done now -- not vote for a bill that is politically motivated.
Will the Senate pass H. R. 3350 … and will the President sign it … and insurance companies renew all policies -- no -- so why vote for it, when you know that it will be used against you ? Further, will Walz's vote “help” Franken and Klobuchar ?
Nationally, the question has changed from “After the GOP Shutdown, can the House Dems return to power” to “How many seats will the House Republicans pick-up?”
My answer is that five of the 39 Members who abandoned the Affordable Care Act will lose their seats … and Tim Walz will survive but Rick Nolan is one of those five.
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