"A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer," reports the AP. The Senate Finance Committee barred annual caps altogether. The merged Senate bill only erases "unreasonable" annual caps. What's "unreasonable?" Hard to say.
Hill sources explain that this was inserted because CBO said premiums would "go through the roof" if insurers couldn't cap benefits. The official quote from Jim Manley, Harry Reid's spokesperson, says much the same thing. "We are concerned that banning all annual limits, regardless of whether services are voluntary, could lead to higher premiums," he explained. "We continue to work with experts on how best to accomplish our goals of preventing insurance companies from imposing arbitrary coverage limits while providing the premium relief American families need and deserve.”You know what happens to the truly worst-case scenarios? They go bankrupt or die because they'll run out of insurance to pay for treatment. Who defines "unreasonable" limits? Who knows? It's sausage in the making, folks. Unreasonable to the insurance companies will of course be "limits high enough that we might lose money on somebody."
This, however, obscures the choice that's being made. The tradeoff here is slightly higher premiums for everyone versus total financial ruin for the people who absolutely need help the most. Politically, choosing "everyone" rather than "people with cancer" makes sense, because the first group has more votes than the second. But on a policy level, it's nuts. Health-care insurance literally exists to protect us from the worst-case scenarios. This provision says that the Senate bill will protect everyone but the truly worst-case scenarios. If you assume that people support the basic concept of health-care insurance, then they don't, or shouldn't, support this.
The more I hear about this plan, the more I'm thinking "screw it". I know that's the whole point of the Senate version of the bill, but still. Ahh, but it gets worse, courtesy Bob Cesca:
Okay, so enough is enough. The White House has to walk away from the PhRMA deal.
Apparently, the White House is working with PhRMA to kill Byron Dorgan's drug reimportation amendment. The amendment would save around $100 billion more than the White House deal for $80 billion. What's bizarre is that there's Republican support for the amendment, and so PhRMA is threatening both Democrats and Republicans who support it.Byron Dorgan wants to re-import drugs from Canada at a savings of $100 billion. Republicans actually like this deal. It's the White House killing it.
But instead of pursuing bipartisanship on this thing, the White House is preferring to stand by whatever deal it made with the lobbyist group.
Think about that for a minute.
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And you can put this in your own "epic fail" basket Zandar... Did you see that the Fluffington Post amended the article, now the end reads:
Publicly, President Obama continues to support reimportation, as he did during the campaign.
"The President supports reimportation of safe and effective drugs. He made that clear in his FY 2010 budget, which included $5 million to enable the FDA to begin developing policy options," reads a statement from the White House. "The Food and Drug Administration has raised safety concerns about the current proposal and will continue exploring policy options to create a pathway to importing safe and effective drugs."
UPDATE: "We're not whipping against the Dorgan amendment. Those rumors just aren't true," says a White House aide in an e-mail. The aide says that the White House has taken no position on the amendment.
So, while it is fun to keep going back to "Senate aides" who choose to remain anonymous but get rewarded with paraphrased quotes (double the obscurity, for flavor!), why don't we refrane from trusting pieces sourced this way.
Just breath a little bit before immediately jumping on board with "the President is killing the reform part of health care reform". That seems to be the only angle the Post wants to report on, regardless of the validity of its reasons for doing so. Think about that for a minute.
I mean, for Chrissakes he put funds in the budget to reimport drugs, I think this isn't as cut and dried as you're making it out to be.
It's not Obama I'm worried about as much as I am the ConservaDems. Besides, if Obama's saying one thing (he wants reimportation) and the "White House" is saying something different, there's a damn big problem up there.
Like I said, the piece quotes "Senate aides" so the inside word used to report on the WH allegedly undermining the Senate comes from a second hand source (at best). If we could actually find a handful of Republicans willing to actually do their damn job and govern then conservadems are less of a problem (in this specific case).
It really boggles the mind that 1) the GOP want to get elected to stop Congress from legislating and 2) the GOP loses power to dictate what a bill does say when it is passed by voting as a single party (although the Dems try their hardest to get stuff on the GOP's behalf). 1) is my biggest concern, if the nation agrees with that strategy THEN we have a real problem, in fact we would have California writ large.
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