Is The House Bill a Real Answer For Health Care?

Although the House has finally come up with a bill for national healthcare it falls short of accomplishing Democrat’s original goal of total healthcare. When the news broke out today it was touted as an $894 billion piece of legislation, but the congressional budget office believes the bill will spend more like $1.05 trillion over the next decade. Republicans fear that the bill will cause a virtual quagmire by creating new bureaucracies that won’t actually fix anything, which would initiate huge administrative costs to eliminate the huge administrative costs that consumers and employers are now paying to merely support the insurance companies.

According to Health Reform Watch, a web log of the Seton Hall University school of law the combined 2009 salaries of the ten top paid Health Insurance CEO’s amounts to more than $4 billion. CNN reported that the health insurance industry posted over $27 billion in profits for 2008. All of that money was coming from employers and consumers and amounts to over $31 billion in costs above and beyond the actual cost of healthcare. Given that this healthcare, paid for in the first place by consumers is being denied to many because of pre-existing conditions and that ABC news reported this week that women are typically charged up to 70% more for a basic healthcare coverage policy than males of the same age—these profits seem unjustified. They are also not accurate.

When the open enrollment period occurred on my day job last November, I faced a steep increase for my own coverage which put my deduction to $75.00 per pay period for single coverage. The cost to ad my wife to the coverage boosted my plan cost to $220.00 per pay period. That is a 190% increase from my portion of the cost of the policy, which is then added to the total, rendering the cost of the whole package 290% higher that it would have been with single coverage. That is hardly 70% more than the cost of insuring a male. This increase did not involve questions concerning her state of health or age. It was a simple grid. But that is enough of this type of explanation. We already know the system is broken.

The bill the Democrats have come up with is different than we are being told it is. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the $1.05 Trillion bill would eliminate $104 billion of the public deficit in the next decade, but privately it has expressed reservations that this will actually happen. And although Republicans fear that most of the savings will be the result of stopping the growth of Medicare it is a false fear.

As for the Democrats, they don’t view this legislation as the solution. They view this as the first step. According to the Wall Street Journal, “House Democrats said the bill was a historic step toward universal health insurance.” As huge as this bill is, it only increases overall coverage by 13% of the population. They estimate that 96% of the population will be covered, which is up from 83%. And although the bill stops some flagrant abuses—pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied and consumer out of pocket expenses are capped—it is still massive in scope and falls short of the Democrats’ ultimate goal of universal coverage. So even with this bill, you can look forward to more of this to come until that goal is achieved. The good news is that if and when that goal is realized Medicare will no longer be necessary. With true universal coverage everyone will receive healthcare anyway, so Medicare would be redundant.

The health insurance industry does not support this bill because the public option is in it and they believe the public option will put them out of business. Truthfully, with CEO salaries of the top ten companies at a combined cost of over $4 billion annually and with industry profits for these incorporated middlemen at over $27 billion annually—what good are they to the American public when not one dollar of their profits contributes to our national health? In fact, a huge part of the money that does not wind up as profit goes to exorbitant administration costs, much of which supports a concerted effort to deny coverage for many reasons that don’t amount to pre-existing conditions. This money, which by itself is a very significant figure, also doesn’t contribute to our national health. But it does a great deal to insure that the profit line and CEO salaries are as big as they are.

Yes, we have an insurance commission to watch over these companies to insure (poor choice of words, I know) that abuse in this arena is kept to a minimum. But when you are over 40 years old and your annual physical requires a colonoscopy and they find a polyp, just one, your insurance company pays for the colonoscopy as a regularly required procedure. When at 45 you need a second colonoscopy, during which another polyp is found, if your insurance company denies you this coverage because of pre-existing conditions even though you have had continuous coverage—will you feel like the insurance commission is doing its job when you receive a bill for $850 because they refused to pay for the procedure which is a standard part of your annual physical? And how will you feel about the fact that the insurance company didn’t make the decision until three weeks after you had this required procedure?

Clearly, the public can afford not to care at all that the health insurance companies don’t like this bill in its current form. I would be more concerned if they were happy with it. Not giving the insurance companies another dime would go a long way toward covering the cost of this endeavor. Still, fixing our ailing healthcare system is a very large undertaking and it will be a long time before it is over. And sadly, due to the nature of compromise it will probably not get fixed in a way that will truly result in universal healthcare.

Although most things in America are truly best left to the private sector, healthcare is not one of them. With globalization, declining salaries and rising unemployment still changing the face of the American economy we would be much better off if we were not saddled with the cost of our healthcare in the same way we are now. Healthcare should be on the same list as our police and fire protection, road maintenance and other infrastructure items.