Health Care Bill Will Hurt Too Many Struggling Americans: Progressive Must Say No

The health care bill is a disaster. Not passing in its current form would be better for most of the American people than not. Not because the American public lost a public option bill that 70% of people wanted. The public option was a terrible idea. The Senate Health Care Bill and to a smaller extent the House Bill will create a tax on working people while at the same time because it won't have cost controls blow up the national budget. Its a disastrous bill that wouldn't be fixed for years and not after it caused needless harm. First lets get this lie out of the way - the Health Care Bill does not "cover" 30 million uninsured, it forces them to buy insurance whether they can afford it or not. So if you don't have insurance now and you earn over $14,440 you will have to find a way on say $15,000 to pay for health care. Health care could cost up to $5,000 for an individual, square that math? That's without premiums, which can be any amount essentially, and the lowest cost plans have no regulation on how little they provide. Premiums for people with chronic disease which working class people have disproportionately can be 3 times the rate for non-chronic premiums. 80% of Black men like me have high blood pressure, which means i would have to pay 3 times as much as someone who doesn't. Poor people have to make less than $14,440 to get covered by medicaid, an extension but hardly the coverage Americans need. Our paychecks being forced to get coverage, then go to premiums that will go up and up (150% from current levels at start), and they can charge us up to $7,000 per year in extra fees for care. That this gets introduced as "affordable" health care for Americans shows how out of touch DC politicians and news media's corporate talking heads are. That is probably why The Cleveland Clinic, head - the clinic that President Barack Obama says is the model for the US - explained that the health care legislation is crap (he uses nicer words): Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Delos “Toby” Cosgrove says the bill that passed the U.S. House and proposals in the Senate won’t do enough to control health care costs. In a speech Tuesday at a Cleveland law firm, Cosgrove also said the measures won’t do much to make America healthier. The tax on the working poor in mandated coverage isn't the only tax on Americans in this bill. Remember when candidate Obama said no new taxes on 95% of Americans. Well as Bob Herbet great column in NY Times explains this too is a lie its a little long but its important so pleas read: The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care. The tax would kick in on plans exceeding $23,000 annually for family coverage and $8,500 for individuals, starting in 2013. In the first year it would affect relatively few people in the middle class. But because of the steadily rising costs of health care in the U.S., more and more plans would reach the taxation threshold each year. Within three years of its implementation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the tax would apply to nearly 20 percent of all workers with employer-provided health coverage in the country, affecting some 31 million people. Within six years, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax would reach a fifth of all households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 annually. Those families can hardly be considered very wealthy. Proponents say the tax will raise nearly $150 billion over 10 years, but there’s a catch. It’s not expected to raise this money directly. The dirty little secret behind this onerous tax is that no one expects very many people to pay it. The idea is that rather than fork over 40 percent in taxes on the amount by which policies exceed the threshold, employers (and individuals who purchase health insurance on their own) will have little choice but to ratchet down the quality of their health plans. ...Proponents say this is a terrific way to hold down health care costs. If policyholders have to pay more out of their own pockets, they will be more careful — that is to say, more reluctant — to access health services. Think about that, they want to keep down cost by making it so expensive for you to access it, you will think twice. So your bills will go up, it won't be affordable and they way the bills keep down cost is not to limit drug companies and for profit hospitals earnings but to have YOU go to the Doctor less. As if the problem now is so many Americans using the system without concern for cost. The problem is the cost to begin with and the care we get for the price. On the other hand, people with very serious illnesses will be saddled with much higher out-of-pocket costs. And a reluctance to seek treatment for something that might seem relatively minor at first could well have terrible (and terribly expensive) consequences in the long run. If even the plan’s proponents do not expect policyholders to pay the tax, how will it raise $150 billion in a decade? Great question. We all remember learning in school about the suspension of disbelief. This part of the Senate’s health benefits taxation scheme requires a monumental suspension of disbelief. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, less than 18 percent of the revenue will come from the tax itself. The rest of the $150 billion, more than 82 percent of it, will come from the income taxes paid by workers who have been given pay raises by employers who will have voluntarily handed over the money they saved by offering their employees less valuable health insurance plans. In case you think they might actually fork over that money to employees I have this little graph which should put an end to that lie. As Newsweek explains: Even under the most generous assessment of the plan even what costs American's an unbearable 19% of income on average will go up to 25% of your income on your health care. To make matters worse the American taxpayer has to pay for all the other costs in the system. Besides encouraging you to not use the doctor and a few actually really good but far too short cost saving measures, cost will explode. Further from Newsweek: Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School, gave the various health bills a "failing grade" and said they wouldn't "control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care." This bill is a ticking time bomb that because it was so compromised to the insurance and drug corporations will enrich them and make us all bankrupt. There are some good things in the bill like stopping discrimination by health insurance companies and limiting cost is a good start. In fact Bernie Sanders also added $10 billion for health centers around the country. Via Crooks and Liars: ...allow states waivers so they can move forward with their own "health insurance concepts, including single-payer." Such language is now in the Senate bill and Sanders is still working with Senator Ron Wyden to strengthen it. That is exactly how Canada developed its healthcare system, with a successful program incubated in Saskatchewan. This provision is actually stronger in the Senate bill--it didn't make it into the House version. But all of these can be passed piecemeal via reconciliation. Obama won't get his signing ceremony in the Rose Garden and it is an ugly process, but its how medicare was passed as well. We have a path to victory that gets a real health care reform bill. Daily Kos front pager made this point clearly: Over the last year, we've posted 148 stories on the Daily Kos front page discussing reconciliation, the legislative process through which the Senate can pass legislation by a simple majority. The Daily Kos community has posted another 1,407 diaries discussing the topic, most of them supportive of using reconciliation. ...Even though there is ample precedent for using reconciliation to pass top legislative priorities -- George W. Bush passed his tax cuts through reconciliation -- Democratic leadership in the Senate and the White House pretty much took reconciliation off the table during the health care debate, arguing that we just didn't understand the legislative process. Reconciliation, they said, wasn't the most effective way to pass legislation. In their eyes, the standard Senate rulebook was the smarter approach, and as a result we got saddled with the 60-vote supermajority requirement. Democrats should not pass a bill that enriches corporations and taxes middle and working class people. For that we SHOULD lose.