people who are pushing this plan should be truthful.
It is based on a failed health care model, it will not lead to single payer and the weak "public option" with limited access was bought by insurance companies along with a promise to criminalize the uninsured.
Testimony of Quentin Young, M.D., to the House Ways and Means Committee
"...Third, because of this inability to control costs or realize administrative savings, the coverage and benefits that can be offered under the discussion draft will be of the same type currently offered by private carriers, which cause millions of insured Americans to go without needed care due to costs and have led to an epidemic of medical bankruptcies.
Virtually all of the reforms contained in the discussion draft have been tried, and have failed repeatedly. Plans that combined mandates to purchase coverage with Medicaid expansions fell apart in Massachusetts (1988), Oregon (1992), and Washington state (1993); the latest iteration (Massachusetts, 2006) is already stumbling, with uninsurance again rising and costs soaring. Tennessee’s experiment with a massive Medicaid expansion and a public plan option worked — for one year, until rising costs sank it.
...The $1 trillion price tag on the Tri-Committee proposal already threatens to capsize our new President’s flagship initiative. In contrast, single payer avoids these hazardous political waters entirely because it requires no new sources of funding.
In tumultuous economic times, single payer is the only fiscally responsible option. Two-thirds of the American people support it. The majority of physicians are in favor of it, as are the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 39 state labor federations and hundreds of local unions across the country. Millions of Americans are mobilized to struggle for single payer, but your leadership is crucial. I hope this Committee will see fit to provide it."
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/june/testimony_of_quentin.phpThe mess of a plan in Mass. that we are modeling our national plan on:
"Yet despite the threat of a $1,068 fine for being uninsured, hundreds of thousands remain uncovered in Massachusetts, and the number of uninsured patients showing up at hospitals and clinics has fallen by only one-third. Moreover, according to surveys one in five state residents (including many with insurance) cannot afford care, and those directly affected by the reform are more likely to say it has hurt than helped them.
High costs and skimpy coverage are in the reform's DNA; private insurers drafted its blueprint, cementing their dominant role. As a result, the plan forfeited the savings on bureaucracy that a single-payer plan could realize--an estimated $7.8 billion annually in Massachusetts alone. The public-plan option that Massachusetts's reform offers to the near-poor hasn't trimmed bureaucracy--a warning that this option, pushed as a compromise at the federal level by erstwhile single-payer supporters, would yield scant savings. Indeed, Massachusetts's reform has actually increased bureaucratic costs; the new insurance exchange (similar to that touted by President Obama and Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus) has added 4 percent to insurers' already high overhead. Promised savings through prevention, care management and computerization (also mainstays of Obama's plan) haven't materialized. Consequently, much of the new coverage has come with unaffordable out-of-pocket costs. And cost overruns have drained state funding for care of those who remain uninsured."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090427/himmelstein_woolhandlerMassachusettes just kicked off all subsidized legal immigrants. Sorry no money. I wonder how those folks will pay the $1068.00 fine per year.
This is about millions of new captive customers for the insurance industry. They know with an aging boomer population eligible for medicare and growing support for a single payer type system their business future is not very bright. So they design a system built on a failed model(which failed because of being forced to compete with for profit private insurance) and we criminize those who can't afford it.
They said it themselves:
The industry's real trouble begins in 2011, when 79 million baby boomers begin turning 65. Health insurers stand to lose a huge slice of their commercially insured enrollment (estimated at 162 million to 172 million people) over the next two decades to Medicare, the government-funded health insurance program for seniors.
"The rate of aging far and away exceeds the birth rate," said Sheryl Skolnick, a CRT Capital Group healthcare investment analyst. "That's got to be very scary. . . . This is the biggest fight for survival managed care has ever faced, at least since they went bankrupt in the late '80s."
..."They are interested in 45 million new customers," he said, "but the first thing in everybody's mind is preserving their right to do business in a way that can be profitable and meet shareholder needs."
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/07/business/fi-healthcare7?pg=1
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