Baucus’ Senate Plan Released

There is not much exciting to say about the plan released today–not close to my idea of robust health care reform. If you should have time to read the proposal:

America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009: http://www.bobcesca.com/images/091609%20Americas_Healthy_Future_Act.pdf

The bill reflects many compromises with Republicans but few if any (perhaps Snowe) will support the Baucus bill anyhow. Jay Rockefeller (House Finance Committee, Health Care Subcommittee), will not support it. So Baucus will have difficult time justifying the compromises.

Should you not want to read the bill (nobody else will including most members of Congress and their staffs), here are my first takes on it:

1. Cost variation: Currently insurers can raise rates or deny coverage based on preexisting conditions. Such practice would not be permitted—a good, essential, and moral element of this plan. Rescissions (cancellations) will not be allowed. However, there will be some allowable risk selection, expressed in ratios: Tobacco use can increase premium by 50 percent; Age can increase rates by as much as five times the base. Family coverage would be three times that of individual coverage.

· The House bills seem to agree on a two-to-one variation for age.

· The maximum total variation (all risks considered) could be as much as 7.5-1. Premiums would be the same across a region (not a state).

1. Exchanges for selecting a health care policy are included.

• However, alternative health insurance exchange proposals such as that proposed by Democrat RonWyden (Free Choice Act) are far better: “An open the exchanges to all Americans and all businesses. It would also let those of us with employer-based insurance take the money our employers are paying for our insurance and use it on the exchange instead. This idea wouldn’t take away what anyone has. But it would allow those of us who don’t like what we have to change it. More so than any other idea in the health-care debate, it offers a concrete way that reform could benefit the insured. It gives them a way out of a health-care system that is eating through their wages and limiting their choices.”

Let’s see how the media responds to the Baucus proposal. Now that all five Congress and Senate committees have proposed legislation, there should be some serious attention health care and insurance reform given the issue in the coming days. –Marvin