President Obama and many congressional Democrats seem to feel their only chance to reform health care lies in passing the lousy Senate bill or a few a la carte measures — lame, face-saving expedients they hope would allow them to move on to other issues without being accused of giving up.
We’ve got a better way to go, one every American can readily understand and get behind, and one every Democrat in Congress should be able to support.
As you’ll see, our eight-point plan eliminates or otherwise deals with some of the supposed main sticking points in House and Senate plans as they’ve evolved, providing truly universal coverage in ways that should not balloon the deficit.
With that, here we go:
- Commercial insurers will be free to reject people for pre-existing conditions and charge whatever the traffic will bear — provided their charges do not excessively and unjustifiably exceed comparable coverage from other companies.
- Commercial insurers will be free to drop customers for: A, provable deliberate deception, immediately, or, B, for any other reason, but only by notifying the customer to be dropped 18 months in advance.
- A commission will be created to recommend malpractice litigation reforms, with a specific charge to come up with ways to discourage and/or penalize those who attempt to use litigation as a shakedown, hoping the practitioner they’re suing will offer a quick settlement to avoid legal expenses and bad publicity.
- Federally operated health insurance exchanges won’t be created, but states will be encouraged to set up their own exchanges.
- Those satisfied with the commercial insurance they have will be free to keep that coverage for as long as they wish.
- We will create a federal public option plan that will seek no more than 3 percent profit and be available to every American citizen 25 to 64 years old. Those at 20 percent above poverty level and below will be charged on the basis of their ability to pay.
Young adults 18 to 24 will be able to stay on their parents’ health insurance. Those 25 to 30 will be encouraged but not required to buy public or private health insurance. However, if employed, those who choose not to buy insurance will be required, at age 25, to put $40 a month into a Medical Responsibility Savings Account, with their employer contributing half that amount. Then each year through age 30, monthly savings will increase by $10 a month for the individual and $5 for the employer. Past age 30, when an individual can show that he or she has bought health insurance at a reasonable level of coverage for two years, they may draw down money in their Medical Responsibility Savings Account for the purpose of paying health insurance premiums going forward — in effect, getting their savings, plus interest, back.
- The antitrust exemption for health insurers will be eliminated.
- Insurers of all kinds will be required to demonstrate biannually to a federal regulatory agency that they are operating in the public interest. Companies that show a pattern of deceptive behavior, exceptional levels of failure to pay benefits, price gouging, excessive profit taking and/or irresponsible financial management will be subject to having their license to sell insurance revoked and their corporate charter, if any, will be eliminated. Principals of any company so dissolved will be prohibited from ever again holding a position of executive authority or high responsibility in any insurance business or closely related business.
(Note that No. 8 applies not only to health insurers, but to all insurers including AIG.)
That’s our plan. Let us know what you think of it and about how passable you think it is.
“Let us know what you think of it.” Excellent. Covers all of the necessary points I can think of, and without requiring a 500-jillion page bill that nobody has ever read.
“and about how passable you think it is.” You’re kidding, right?
It makes way too much sense S.W., if you can amend it and add something really complicated, preferably in Legalese, perhaps our beloved Congressmen and women, might, time permitting, some time before November, give it a shot.
I would never pass it makes too much sense. Holte is right…it needs about 3,000 more pages of gobbledygook and “heretofores”. Otherwise, it’s fine by me!
Nope after this week health care is dead. With lobbyists and bags of money the insurance companies won. They paid off enough Dems to make this worthless.
$40 a month to pay for a plan? Give me a break! You can’t get anything for less than $800 (single person) per month (COBRA). So at that rate someone putting in $40 a month for 5 years would have $2400 that would pay for about two months coverage by then. Or did I miss something?
Tom, thanks for the encouraging words.
Holte, more details would have to be added to actual legislation. I wanted to create a coherent outline in broad strokes that the honorables could lay out and explain to the public in a few minutes — something that’s important to be able to do.
Bee, I’m sure it would be given some more pages of gobbledygook.
Demeur, like the guy said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” If you’ll go back and look, you’ll see it’s not $40/month for young adults. It starts out at age 25 at $60/month and goes up each year.
Fortunately, most young people are very healthy and understandably resent being forced to buy insurance by the government. I’m trying to give the majority of them who go to work in low-paying, meager or no-benefits service and retail jobs an incentive to buy health insurance or at least save something in case they do need medical care. Others who work in skilled trades, the medical field, education, manufacturing, etc., will probably have medical insurance through their employers. It’s a reasonable compromise that softens one of the most resented parts of the Senate bill.
Good ideas, SW.
But even with a better health insurance system, we still need to deal with the high and rising cost of health care itself.
Exactly, RSF, and many additional measures can be added in subsequent legislation once the insurance system is straightened out. We have to start somewhere, and my reforms get things off to a big start.