Oh dear, I knew I'd get upset if I looked at the White House's "myths" page. I should have continued to avoid it. I'll give myself a heart attack... but at least right now I could still get to a hospital. That may not be possible in the future.
Sat through most of the video at the White House site that I believe is titled something like, "Will there be rationing?" A lady with an Indian name, who says she's a doctor but somehow ended up as a White House public relations flak-catcher, tells us that, as Comrade Osama promises, "If you like your health insurance, you can keep it."
That is a complete lie. Has this person not read the bill? Or perhaps she's lost in Osama's Hope & Change Fantasyland, where there's this perfect Utopian reform bill that no one has seen yet. Maybe he'll let congress have a peek at it before Pazzo Pelosi schedules the vote on it, but I wouldn't bet any money on that.
In the first 50 pages of HR3200, there's a long and rather tedious discussion of the Health Insurance Exchange, which will set up standards to mandate certain types of coverage in basic, intermediate, and cadillac health insurance categories. (The bill's wording is different. Probably such tortured bureaucratese my mind just refuses to retain it.)
Anyway, if your current coverage meets these yet-to-be-determined standards, maybe you can keep it.... If your employer can continue to pay for it, if your insurance carrier continues to offer it and submits it to the approval process of the federal Health Care Kommissariat that the bill sets up, etc. etc.
Medicare is being changed, altered in several ways, and not all positive for recipients. Medicaid is being altered through the states. Apparently if you have a Health Savings Account with insurance for catastrophic coverage and/or hospitalization, that will no longer be allowed.
In addition, HR3200 even names and defines "grandfathered" insurance coverage -- which are the existing insurance policies currently offered to employees by many corporations and other employers. "Grandfathered" means that this coverage has been marked to be phased out by HR3200. So I guess you can keep your copy of your existing insurance policy if you want, even if your actual insurance plan has been "grandfathered out" and doesn't exist anymore. Think of it as souvenir of better times.
I'm sorry, none of the above indicates that citizens will be able to keep their insurance if they like it. Rather, it tells me that the federal government is going to determine what kind of insurance it thinks we all need and how much we're going to pay for it. Because, by the way, the feds setting rates for insurance premiums is in the bill, too.
OK. Without going any further into the deep weeds of HR3200, it very plainly states that you will not be able to keep the insurance you have if only because it will no longer be available. It may/may not be government-approved, and if it's not government-approved, it won't meet the government requirement for having a government-approved insurance policy -- and that requirement is in the bill.
This doctor on the White House vid adds insult to injury. She says, "Trust me, you'll be able to keep the insurance you have."
Yeah, right. She says, "I'm flat-out straight-up lying to your face, but 'trust me.'"
Hey, anybody want to buy a nice plot of land in Florida? Or maybe the Brooklyn Bridge? Trust me, I can get it for you wholesale.
And, by the way, you can compare the health reform bills side-by-side at this web site: http://www.kff.org/healthreform/sidebyside.cfm . It's the Kaiser Foundation.
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