Nationalized Healthcare Part 2

I know, yesterday I went on about the trials and mess associated with nationalized healthcare and that isn’t what is being proposed in these bills. Yes, I understand that, but that is where these bills are leading us. Granted they wouldn’t take us there next week. It may even take years, a myriad of lawsuits, and a lot of jobs lost and businesses destroyed, but it would take us there.

What these bills are doing is requiring certain levels of coverage and mandating that employers provide coverage. (Let’s ignore the fact that this would cripple small business and completely drive some of them out of business. I know, I was talking to a small business owner this weekend who is already struggling and views this change as the gallows.) This minimum coverage level is a political tool. Lobbyists are already raking in the dollars pushing the right people to include their industry in the minimum coverage. Of course existing plans would not have to up their coverage for five years, unless of course they make a change in coverage, premium, or pretty much a letter in their plethora of paperwork. If they changed anything, they have to switch to the minimum coverage. Naturally this increased coverage (not increased benefit necessarily) of course costs more. So now private insurance companies have to adjust their rates for this adjusted level of care and they won’t be going down.

At the same time you have the “public option”, which is where the government comes into the game. Number one they aren’t a ‘for profit’ entity, so they aren’t trying to maintain the margins that the private insurance companies do. They also aren’t subject to the same tax laws as the private companies, and as we’ve already discussed, they have a huge percentage of the market and dictate what they will pay. The resulting decrease in government rates from the “public plan” now increases the rates on the private insurance companies, as I mentioned in part 1.

Now companies are in a struggling economy looking at their medical insurance costs shoot through the roof. So, they lay off some employees and take a look at their alternatives. They are spending a significant amount per employee to have insurance coverage and it is increasing all of the time as the Secretary of Health and Human Services decides on new additions to the minimum coverage. The law says that you have to provide coverage or pay a fine, but the fine is less than what the coverage is costing per employee. It doesn’t take a very creative bookkeeper to discontinue coverage and dump every employee into the “public option” to opt for a government fine that is lower and more stable than providing coverage at the minimum level.

So after all of the private insurance companies have been driven out of business, you will have socialized medicine on a single payer system. That’s when the fun we’ve already discussed in part 1 kicks in. It’s not an immediate take over, but it is a take over and a big one considering healthcare makes up approximately 17% of the US economy.

There are other issues that need to be considered as well and I need to actually dig through the nuts and bolts of this bill. There HAS to be some very creative wording in here regarding law suits and I’m very intrigued as to what it says. When it comes to providing health insurance there is always the risk of law suits, some legit, some not. However will the government ALLOW themselves to be sued if they wrongfully refuse coverage or will they be able to claim sovereign immunity? Hmm… I’m very intrigued. Since it is the government writing the bill you would think that they would specifically express that sovereign immunity applies, but since it is being written by liberals who have been on the receiving end of millions in campaign contributions from trial lawyers, they might specifically deny it, just to throw their loyal contributors a bone.

Either way… it’s not good for any of us.

… and on a side note, it will never apply to those who are voting for it. Their fluffy government insurance stays put for life.