It seems like an appropriate name for morass that is the House Democrats healthcare plan. A plan that will hose people who are successful and create a bureaucratic mess illustrated by the flowchart below (click the picture for a larger version).
It looks a little like chutes and ladders doesn’t it? Then you have little gems like this… a provision that will make individual private health insurance illegal as the Investor’s Business Daily discovered:
When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:
"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
I’m sure they didn’t mean to put that in there did they? It must be a mistake. To any current or future state or federal legislator who may come across this post, may this be a lesson to you, read the darn bill. Oh but that’s not all, IBD continues…
The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, "fizzle out altogether."
What wasn’t known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.
The legislation is also likely to finish off health savings accounts, a goal that Democrats have had for years. They want to crush that alternative because nothing gives individuals more control over their medical care, and the government less, than HSAs.
This health care plan is bad news. There is no doubt that health care needs to be addressed. But again one of the scariest phrases ever heard by man, “we’re from the Government and we are here to help.”
Update: Leave it to the New York Times to defend health care rationing. If the House Health Care Reform Bill doesn’t pass, go kiss a Blue Dog Democrat, but will they have any bite?
2nd Update: If the Democrats don’t want to listen to common sense, maybe they’ll at least listen to the Congressional Budget Office.