Health Insurance Bill Crashing and Burning

The ultimate outcome of the subsidized-health-care-for-the-uninsured bill currently crashing and burning in the United States Senate will likely be known while I’m out of the country.

This was my prediction on Twitter back on November 21: “Health insurance bill was dead, WH resuscitated it with two razor thin votes. I’ll predict now: hard left bill won’t pass.”

As it stands today, the public option is gone from the bill. The expansion of Medicare (just another way of doing the public option) is gone from the bill. Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) is pro-life and insists that he won’t vote to start funding abortion with federal tax dollars. Meanwhile, the far left is insisting they won’t vote to reform health care unless it can fund abortion with our tax dollars.

The rabid left has gone even further than that: now, many of them want to kill the bill entirely. Creating a multi-trillion dollar program to give away health care to anyone who can’t afford it isn’t good enough. If they can’t have the government also take over 1/6th of the American economy, they want to take their marbles and go home.

Plan? What plan?

Meanwhile, the White House position appears to be that they would be perfectly happy if Congress passed a law providing enhanced veterinarian services to horses, as long as the name of the bill is “Health Care Reform” so they can claim victory.

The far left has turned on this President with a vengeance. “Mr. President…where are you? Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you’re nothing but a sellout — a corporate sellout,” said talk show host Ed Schultz. “The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry — they get a bunch of new customers.”

In fact, many of the rabid left would probably find this Google ad ironic given that they are faulting the President for not introducing a plan of his own:

Bottom line: I still think the White House may get their way and “a bill” will pass, because there are 60 Democrats who believe in passing a massive set of subsidies to buy everyone health insurance, and are willing to slash Medicare by $400 billion, and raise multitudes of taxes directly affecting the middle class, to pay for it. At the end of the day, they may water the bill down to the point that they do just that.

But the government takeover of health care appears to be dead. And I will not be surprised one bit if I return home to find that the legislation has crashed and burned entirely.

Ideas for Reforming the Health Care System

The sad part of all of this is that we actually need serious reform to health insurance. The current escalation in health care costs and health insurance premiums is completely unsustainable. If you need some good background on that, check out David Goldhill’s article on the unsustainable design of our system for financing health care.

Here are some of the ideas we discussed on this blog back in October…

• Encourage awareness of costs. Require health care providers to clearly post their rates in a visible location, and have a consistent set of fees for the insured and uninsured, to promote competition and transparency. (via fiddlrts and music2myear)
• Tort reform to reduce malpractice costs. (via Dan Lombard and music2myear)
• Incentivize high deductible plans for emergencies and high-cost services, and go to cash for routine medical expenses. (via music2myear)
• Eliminate regulations to increase competition among health care providers, much like the “Lasik” model and plastic surgery today. (via music2myear)
• Eliminate fee-for-service entirely. (via joshwinn, lots of discussion in this thread)
• Make health insurance like car insurance. Minimum required coverage obtained through a carrier of their choice. (via dukeronald)
• Forbid “minimum required coverage” policies entirely. (via music2myear)
• Allow purchasing of insurance from any carrier across state or regional lines to promote competition and drive down premiums. (via music2myear)

Lots of great ideas in this discussion. I have a couple of my own, and we’ll see if I can get to writing a post about them in the next few days. Airplane time has always been great for blogging in the past.

And now, the giveaway!

I promised to give away a copy of Who Killed Health Care: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem by Professor Regina Herzlinger (paper or Kindle edition, your choice).

Everyone who contributed a comment was included in the random drawing, and the winner was music2myear! I hope he greatly enjoys the book, and thank you to everyone for your participation!

Question

So now, it’s prediction time. What do you think the outcome of this bill will be? Will the entire effort fail and nothing passes at all? Or will the basic core of the bill — paying for health insurance for the uninsured — make it out of the Senate? Use the comments below to make your prediction.