Of Course the "Keep Your Plan" Bill Hurts Regular People; It's A GOP Idea

You don't even have to know the details: if it's a GOP idea, it hurts working people, the poor, children, women, minorities - everyone who is not a rich, white, straight, xian, republican male.

Shame on President Obama - not for making a stupidly over-simplified "promise," but for apologizing for protecting stupid people from the shitty non-insurance plans that would bankrupt them if they ever actually needed them.

Because now a bill to appease a handful of whiny-ass titty babies threatens to bring down a program that is saving the lives of tens of millions of people.

Sahil Kapur at TPM:

House Republicans have teed up a vote this Friday on legislation aimed at letting Americans hold on to their health insurance plans next year.

The vote on the two-page "Keep Your Health Plan Act," sponsored by House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), comes amid a swirl of controversy surrounding President Barack Obama's promise that individuals who liked their policies wouldn't lose them. The president apologized last week to those who have lost their insurance coverage, but maintained that Obamacare fixes major flaws in the system while preserving the status quo to the extent possible.

SNIP

 

"There are concerns about how this would work operationally," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's top lobbying group. "The goal of letting people keep their plans is a good one. But there are a number of outstanding questions that would have to be addressed for this to work as intended."

Nicholas Bagley, a professor of health law at the University of Michigan, pointed out that those who currently have policies on the individual market tend to be healthier than most -- if not, they'd probably be priced out or locked out due to a preexisting condition. "If those relatively healthy people can keep their current plans outside the exchanges, they won't enter the same risk pool as everyone else on the exchanges," he said. "That means the exchanges will have a higher proportion of unhealthy people shopping for insurance than anticipated."

"In the long run, that will drive up the cost of insurance on the exchanges," Bagley said. "In the short run, it could mean that the prices at which insurers are selling their plans are too low to cover the medical costs of those who enroll. Because the adoption of the Upton bill would wreak havoc with their actuarial models, insurers are likely to resist its adoption."

Or as Steve M put it:

All of this is a long way of saying: this thing needs to be saved or it really might be completely lost.

Would we ever repeal a health benefit program that's been enacted? Hayward reminds us that, in the not-so-distant past, we did:

This wouldn't be the first time that a health care entitlement was repealed. The same thing happened in the late 1980s with catastrophic coverage for seniors. Because seniors were made to pay for their benefits under that scheme, the uproar forced Congress to repeal the measure barely a year after it went into effect.

Ordinary people aren't like the rich. We don't treat everything we get from government as a birthright. We won't fight to save Obamacare's benefits. So it's up to the White House and congressional Democrats to save them -- right now.

 Oh, and Fuck You, Bill Clinton.