535 People in Washington Deciding the future of YOUR Health Care | Today’s Update

For lib­er­als who have blind faith in Big Gov­ern­ment Plan­ning, file this under unin­tended con­se­quences:

Three years ago, Mass­a­chu­setts passed the most sweep­ing health­care bill in the coun­try, adopt­ing a plan that closely resem­bles the pro­pos­als being con­sid­ered by Con­gress. The result today? Health insur­ance pre­mi­ums for most res­i­dents are going up. Many middle-class peo­ple who had insur­ance before the over­haul see lit­tle change–except that they’re spend­ing more on health­care. And costs, such as pay­ments to doc­tors and hos­pi­tals, are still soar­ing. ‘What we did was health insur­ance reform, not health­care reform,’ said Mass­a­chu­setts Sen. James Eldridge, a for­mer pro­po­nent who now regrets hav­ing voted for the bill (Mass­a­chu­setts Offers Lessons Learned on Health­care).

Oh, but the cur­rent Big Gov­ern­ment Plan will make Big Gov­ern­ment National Health Care afford­able  … won’t it?

The gov­ern­ment pro­grams that ALREADY pro­vide health care to the poor would expand to cover nearly one in five Amer­i­cans under health insur­ance leg­is­la­tion pend­ing in Con­gress. How­ever, state bud­gets are stretched at cur­rent lev­els of state spend­ing: Med­ic­aid, one of the fastest-growing gov­ern­ment pro­grams for two decades, and the State Children’s Health Insur­ance Pro­gram would grow from about 50 mil­lion peo­ple today to more than 60 mil­lion in 2019, accord­ing to data from the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office and Kaiser Fam­ily Foun­da­tion. That would be the biggest sin­gle expan­sion since Med­ic­aid was cre­ated in 1965.

The fed­eral gov­ern­ment paid $258 bil­lion for Med­ic­aid in 2009, about 57% of total costs, but would pay 90% of the expan­sion. States would pay about $33 bil­lion, accord­ing to the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office.

“If you go to the store and the shoes are 90% off, it doesn’t mat­ter if you can’t afford the 10%,” says Alan Weil of the National Acad­emy for State Health Pol­icy. (Med­ic­aid, S-CHIP expan­sion plan could hurt states’ bud­gets).

Well, this is all just far too com­pli­cated for the aver­age per­son to under­stand, so Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid has decided to try to unbur­den a con­fused and wor­ried nation:

First, the sen­a­tor opposes post­ing the text of the final health care reform bill on the Inter­net for 72 hours before it is put up for a vote, despite three polls con­ducted in the last three weeks that found wide­spread sup­port for doing so.

Sec­ond, senior but unnamed Mr. Reid aide told Cyber­cast News Ser­vice reporter Nicholas Bal­lasy that the Sen­ate major­ity leader is con­sid­er­ing using an already-passed House bill as a skele­ton on which he will hang the final ver­sion of the Senate’s health­care reform bill that the sen­a­tor is respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing, rather than bring­ing it to the Sen­ate floor in the cus­tom­ary man­ner. By the par­lia­men­tary trick of sub­sti­tu­tion, this would gut the House bill and replace it with a new Sen­ate health care reform bill that has never before been dis­closed, and, thus, has never been sub­ject to debate.

With any luck, it’ll all go down like this:

The first step involved get­ting final Sen­ate Finance Com­mit­tee approval of Chair­man Max Bau­cus’, D-Mont., on health care reform. That has been accomplished.

The sec­ond step is to use the Bau­cus bill as the basic frame­work for the final bill that will be cob­bled together mostly behind closed doors. The hope is that this will make it easy for House lead­er­ship and Obama admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials to influ­ence the bill along with the Sen­ate so that it receives uncon­di­tional sup­port from both Houses of Con­gress and the White House.

The third step is to bring back the pub­lic option. Reid hopes this will be a com­par­a­tively sim­ple manu­ver as the pub­lic optioin is part of the Health Edu­ca­tion Labor and Pen­sions bill that Reid will merge into the Bau­cus bill.

The fourth step is to get a filibuster-proof major­ity that makes pos­si­ble the exe­cu­tion of this plan over the cer­tain but futile objec­tions of Repub­li­cans. This should hap­pen because a Mass­a­chu­setts’ law bar­ring Gov. Deval Patrick from appoint­ing Ted Kennedy’s replace­ment was repealed, and Sen. Paul Kirk was sworn in on Sept. 25, thus bring­ing Sen­ate Democ­rats back to the crit­i­cal 60-vote thresh­old. (Trick Or Treat: Reid’s Hal­loween Health-Care Hor­ror?).

Gov­ern­ment Hands Off My Health Care

Tagged as: Liberal Health Care