Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) just unveiled his much discussed amendment (called a manager’s amendment), which many believe is the President’s last chance to secure significant health care reform before next year’s mid-term elections. Fittingly, since no one has seen the bill, the Senate clerk is now reading the bill, which could take upwards of eight hours. During that time, everyone will be trying to understand what is included in the bill. That includes understanding the key provisions that may have been inserted to win the support of Senator …
The closer you look at the 2074 page Senate Health Bill (H.R. 3590), the more and more complicated it becomes. Forget that level playing field. As the Congress tries to figure out how to extend health insurance coverage to all Americans (They won’t, of course), Senate Democrats have proposed a federally designed health insurance exchange to operate in the several states through which individuals and small employers can purchase bureaucrat- approved health insurance. Embodied in this scheme is the inclusion of generous taxpayer subsidies for Americans whose income falls below …
No one knows for sure how Senator Reid’s health care bill (HR 3590) will impact any particular person or group, but this much is fairly certain: it will cause health insurance premiums to increase faster—not slower—than they would have otherwise. Even the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s non-partisan accountants, says that premiums in the “public option” of Sen. Reid’s bill would turn out to be higher than premiums in typical private plans today. Thus, there are ways to “bend the health care cost curve” downward, but this bill does exactly the …
