At what point does it become time to scrap the health care bill and start over? With Joe Lieberman’s hard line against a Medicare buy-in, and the White House’s appeasement of Lieberman, it is apparent that whatever the final sausage looks like after multiple trips through the process, it won’t be much.
The “public option” is out. The Medicare buy-in is apparently out. There never were any real cost-control mechanisms in the bill to begin with. So what we end up with is more people stuck in the same system, with some mandates to offer insurance.
So again, it looks like employers (again the fall guys for Washington’s failure) get stuck with paying for a system that will only increase in cost over time.
Hopefully, next time we address the issue, it will be with an incremental approach (no denial of coverage, for instance; followed by an increase in HSAs; followed by increasing states’ flexibility with Medicaid; followed by AHPs; etc.) instead of trying to do it all at once in a city where, in the end, nothing gets done right.
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Now is the time. I hope the House kills this bill. It is worse than nothing and it is a total sell-out to the insurance industry.
I guess that it is pretty sweet to the insurance industry to have the government mandate that people buy their products under penalty of law.
I am pretty damn furious this morning.
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