Douglas Turner: Take time to produce a good health care bill
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WASHINGTON — There can be only two reasons Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is in a rush to pass the massive health insurance reform bill.
He wants to get started right away on collecting the billions of new federal taxes to pay for it, and he wants to rush it through before any more resistance to it builds back home. There are no other good reasons to hurry. Few of the benefits outlined in the 2,074-page Senate bill will start until five years from now.
For New Yorkers, there is plenty of cause to slow down the process and produce a really good bill, which this is not. New Yorkers are already reeling from an increase in state health care taxes of 56 percent in the last four years. New York businesses, hospitals and consumers now pay $3.8 billion a year in health taxes, according to researcher E. J. McMahon in “New
York Fiscal Watch.” State Senate Democrats are considering adding $1 billion a year in such taxes.
The U. S. Senate bill, like the House version that passed by just three votes, imposes more crushing new taxes, fines and fees on businesses—costs that promise to stretch out this jobless “recovery.”
Anybody but a professional politician will tell you it’s just plain dumb to raise taxes while 500,000 are losing their jobs every week.
According to every poll, people look negatively at the actuality that this bill does, despite Democratic denials, impose federal government control over all insured health care.
The Heritage Foundation points out the House bill creates a “U. S. Health Choices Commissioner” who would outline what insurance plans will and won’t cover and set the price. Reid’s Senate bill has the U. S. Health and Human Services Department do the same thing, irrespective of whether there is a robust public option.
The public is justifiably nervous about intimations of government rationing, particularly for the elderly in an environment of end-of-life counseling.
Another tremor came when an HHSchartered panel said breast cancer exams should be rolled back.
The most frightening foreshadowing of government rationing is President Obama’s silent Hurricane Katrina: His failure to ensure that enough swine flu vaccinations got to people on time. So far, 877 Americans are dead from H1N1, not counting the 10th-grader who died in Niagara County last week. More kids will perish because of the Obama administration’s ineptness.
New bureaucracies, probable rationing and immense new costs for what? There are 47 million Americans without health insurance now. After the Senate bill’s “benefits” take effect in 2014, there still will be 26 million uninsured.
Congress can put off passing this monstrosity, and enact measured reforms that will be relatively modest in cost and bureaucratic weight:
• End anti-trust immunity for health insurance companies.
• Bar insurers from cutting off coverage for health reasons.
• Bar them from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.
• Require companies to cover dependents up to age 27.
• Pass reasonable limits on damages for malpractice.
• Void Obama’s deal with the pharmaceutical companies and mandate that all prices of all drugs purchased under federal programs be negotiated, and that imports from Canada and Europe be allowed.
• Increase federal investments in medical records exchanges, quality monitoring of state licensing agencies and public accountability.
Right now, the legislation is driven by empty promises, the residue of Obama’s 2008 campaign, congressional Democrats’ need to “do something” before they’re hobbled in next year’s elections and by special interests and ideologues who want to build a pathway to single-payer coverage.
There is still a chance that if this bill is stopped Congress can enact a set of reforms that will “do no harm” and help a lot of people.
dturner@buffnews.com
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