Health ‘reform’ bill a bonanza for the insurance corps
2010Andrew Pollack 2010-01Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 1 →
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On Nov. 7 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a health-care “reform” bill whose central plank was a massive giveaway to private insurers. It included a “public option” plan that would compete in an insurance exchange dominated by the profiteers, and would cover only a fraction of the number projected in earlier versions of the bill.
On Christmas Eve the Senate passed its own bill, which pays even less lip service to reining in insurers’ profiteering and patient dumping.
The final bill, after reconciliation between House and Senate versions, is certain to hew closely to the latter. CNN reported on Dec. 28 that House Democrats were already signaling they were ready to drop the public option, and in general to lean toward the Senate version, using as an excuse the fact that no Republicans had voted for the Senate bill, and that it had passed only after moderate Democrats succeeded in forcing more and more pro-insurer provisions into the bill.
The key supporters of a single-payer (Medicare for All) plan, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and National Nurses United, issued press releases detailing the problems with the Senate bill (and corresponding problems in the House version). These include:
• Cuts of $43 billion in Medicare payments to safety-net hospitals (i.e., the nonprofit institutions relied on disproportionately by the poor and/or (continued on page 4, in “Civilian casualties spiral as U.S. wages terror war in Afghanistan”)
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