(While we’ve been busy crashing the gates of the party, health care and budget issues are rolling along. This is a good little update. – promoted by bolson)
(I composed this for the broader orange audience – let me know if this is too redundant here)
Sen. Sheila Kuehl, the author of the state’s most popular universal health care proposal, nicely waltzes through the Schwarzenegger plan, and leaves no doubt that it’s a patchwork that won’t, in the end, fix a thing.
Kuehl’s key points after the jump.
1. An individual mandate guaranteed to leave millions without insurance.
The central basis of the Governor’s plan is simply to mandate that every Californian must, by law, carry health insurance. There is no requirement that it be affordable and no minimum coverage. This means that the requirement can be met by a bare-bones policy covering only catastrophic events, with a $5,000 deductible and up to $7500 in out of pocket expenses for all the things that aren’t covered by the policy.
This is not universal health insurance. Think for a moment about automobile insurance. Even before Prop 103 passed, limiting the amounts by which insurance companies could raise your auto insurance premiums to those approved by the Insurance Commissioner, we all had to have auto insurance. Would you call it Universal Auto Insurance? 25% of Californians don’t comply […]
Healthcare wonks immediately notice that those uninsured people will just get paid for, expensively and inefficiently, by the rest of the system, by you and me.
2. The employee mandate is nonsense. It only covers 20% of businesses – those with 10 or more employees – and only asks business who opt out to pay for less that half of the cost of insurance. This ham-handed version of a mandate contains the worst of worlds, it continues to let bad bosses skate, and it encourages small employers to reduce payroll. Worse still, this mandate caps employer expenses but shifts 100% of cost increases to employees.
3. Scope. Unbelievably, the plan does not set a floor for minimum benefits.
4. The cost containment farce. Who needs cost containment when you let insurers cut coverage?
5. Screw the poor. The plan costs many families more than the current MediCal cost sharing system does. Parenthetically, this is just one more body blow to a system that structurally unsound. Now reimbursements are so low, most pediatricians refuse to see MediCal kids – they can’t, since reimbursements are around half of actual office expenses.
These are the high points, but go read the rest. It’s the template we’ll be using to fend off another Schwarzenegger big budget disaster.
