Legislation that would transform the nation’s healthcare system cleared a significant hurdle today as the Senate Finance Committee voted 14-9 for a sweeping overhaul.
Just one Republican, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, voted for the bill. But that represented a victory for the White House, which had heavily courted Snowe, and it allowed overhaul advocates to claim that there was a vestige of GOP support for the measure.
“Is this bill all that I would want? Far from it,” Snowe said in announcing her vote. “But when history calls, history calls.”
The bill would require Americans to have health insurance, provide federal subsidies to help low-income workers buy insurance, establish new insurance marketplaces, regulate health insurer practices and expand Medicaid. The plan as drafted is estimated to cost $829 billion over the next 10 years.
The Health Care overhaul should be described as what it is: the Profit Maintenance and Enhancement for Health Insurance and Pharmaceutical Corporations Act of 2009. Today my wife and I were informed that we will see increases in our Medicare Plan D costs of nearly 25% next year. The cost of my wife’s BC/BS plan has increased 100% since the the Prescription “Benefit” Plan with its “donut hole” passed. The Baucus Bill will do nothing to offset that trend – instead we are already seeing the big piggies lining up at the trough. Now we will compel people without insurance to be at the mercy of the piggies who will take them for everything they have. We have cowardly politicians, and indescribably avaricious corporations combining to give us yet another way of making sure that the American people will lose again.
Under Obama, the champion of the little people? No way.
And one of the biggest “Piggies” of them all is AARP, whose annual take from selling insurance is over $400 million. They have a huge stake in getting rid of what is referred to as “the Cadillac health plans.” Why? Because it translates into even bigger bucks for them.
Frankly, I like what I currently have, although the deductibles have increased significantly over the past five years. However, I am positive that my former employer would most certainly do everything possible to get out from underneath the provision of any health benefits . . . and that employer was a State government.
“When history calls, history calls.” That is one of the more pathetic reasons for a Senate vote I’ve ever heard. This boondoggle is going to raise insurance premiums, raise the federal debt, and limit treatment options and medical innovation. And she voted for it because “history” called her? More likely because the White House did.
Umm, I think I’ll stick with the VA Health Care System……and so will my wife.
RE: “We have cowardly politicians, and indescribably avaricious corporations combining to give us yet another way of making sure that the American people will lose again.”
That’s why I can’t understand why people would be opposed to decreased regulations on companies dealing with health insurance [ie, crossing state lines, ie allowing those companies to offer bare-bones policies, etc, etc] so that the monopoly of the piggies can be broken by the free market and so that there is ease of entry into the piggy industry. Nothing makes “avaricious corporations” more disturbed then to see their profits eaten away by innovative fresh upstarts.