Kowabunga

ObamaCare: Know What’s in the Bill

I’ve been filtering through H.R. 3200, the Health Care Reform Bill, popularly refered to as ObamaCare. Normally legislation makes for good bed time reading - it helps puts me to sleep. Not this time. Reading it keeps me awake at nights. When I do fall asleep, I end up waking up in a cold sweat, like I’ve been having a nightmare, a nightmare where it passed and became law.

Fortunately there are a lot of other people reading the bill and providing good analysis of what it all means. Shawn Tully is one such person and raises the alarm on some important things we will lose if HR 3200 passes and becomes law. Read it! Especially Number 4: Freedom to keep your existing plan.

The nut-shell version is we won’t be able to keep our existing plans for very long. Tully points out most working Americans who currently have employer provided insurance, fall into one of two categories. I fall into the second category, and his analysis says this is what I can expect:

The employees who got their coverage before the law goes into effect can keep their plans, but once again, there’s a catch. If the plan changes in any way — by altering co-pays, deductibles, or even switching coverage for this or that drug — the employee must drop out and shop through the exchange. Since these plans generally change their policies every year, it’s likely that millions of employees will lose their plans in 12 months.

Since many companies have open enrollment every year, so that the plan can be adjusted (and there are always changes), this means I will have one year left of private insurance before being forced onto the government program.

The more I read about ObamaCare, the more convinced I am that it will destroy healthcare as we know it. They may be right when they call this “world class”, but that just means we’ll be like Canada and the U.K. (where patients are denied life-saving liver transplants because they are alcoholics), rather than the “best in the World” system we now have.

Of course the wealthy and powerful, like Presidents, Congressmen, and Hollywood elites, will continue to get the best health care in the world, while the rest of us are condemned to ObamaCare.