Health Care Bill Full of Empty Promises

The government sold health care reform with 5 basic talking points:

1. You won’t be able to be kicked off of your insurance when you really need it.

Turns out that the insurance companies CAN kick you off if they pay a fine. It is not hard to imagine that an insurance company will figure out pretty quickly that it would be cheaper to pay the fine than to pay for coverage of a long term chronic illness.

2. You won’t be denied medical care for pre-existing conditions.

If the insurance company deems that you have lied on the application you will be denied coverage.

Sick children are no longer considered to have pre-existing conditions, but what about women who are pregnant?

3. You can keep the doctor you have if you are already covered.

With the cuts in Medicare reimbursements that have already happened (no more consultation fees) and the looming 21% cut at the end of October. Many more physicians than the current 30% are looking to opt out of Medicare. When the commercial insurance reimbursement rates drop (as they invariably will since they pay at a percentage of Medicare) there will be more doctors looking to leave commercial insurance as well.

4. Health care reform will lead to increased access.

There is no way that there will be an increase in access when you take into account; 1) the physician shortage, 2) Those physicians who will leave medicine after the passage of this monstrosity (a recent poll of physicians states that 35% would leave the profession), and 3) those who will stop taking insurance all together because they are simply fed up.

Expanding Medicaid to those who are currently uninsured is not going to help since most doctors are not taking Medicaid now. Currently access to specialists is pretty poor, it will decline further.

5. Health care reform will cover 30 million more uninsured people.

The bill will cover approximately 7 million more people over the next nine years and leave over 100 million people under insured.

6. The health care reform bill will decrease the deficit

The CBO numbers do not take into account the “doctor fix” and the government takeover of student loans was added to pad the numbers.

If you do real world accounting by adding in the “doctor fix” (over 230 million dollars) you actually wipe out the cost savings and you increase the deficit (anywhere from 400-700 million dollars.)

If it sways your opinion at all, the woman that wrote this is a Dr. (Dr. Elainia George). And for those of you that keep tabs on this sort of thing, she is also black. Looks like you can't go calling her an ignorant racist.