* Health care costs will
continue to skyrocket because the bill will do nothing to reduce the $400
billon wasted every year pushing paper to market thousands of plans and
separate people according to eligibility criteria, services covered, etc.
* The much-vaunted insurance regulations e.g. ending denials on the basis of
pre-existing conditions are riddled with loopholes. For instance, older
people can be charged up to three times more than their younger counterparts,
and large companies with a predominantly female workforce can be charged higher
gender-based rates at least until 2017. Policies can still be cancelled in case
of "fraud or intentional misrepresentation", the very, number one excuse
insurers use to cancel policies today.
* About 23 million people will remain uninsured nine years out, which translates
into about 23,000 unnecessary deaths annually and an incalculable suffering.
Instead, Congress and the Obama administration have chosen to burden ordinary people with a "uniquely American" individual obligation to buy a flawed private product even as they called it, with a straight face, "a major triumph over special interests" -- in conjunction with new taxes on workers' health plans, and a perpetuation of a fragmented, unsustainable system that is eroding our health and our economy.
Social health insurance, in the form of single-payer health care (such as Senate Bill 810, recently reintroduced by Senator Mark Leno to the California Legislature), will sooner or later have to be adopted, not because it is politically feasible, but because it is inevitable.
As Harvard professor William Tsiao (the brain behind Taiwan's single-payer system) argued, you can have universal coverage, lower costs, and improve the quality of care, but you need single payer to achieve that.
Note: An edited, slightly less critical of the Obama Administration, version of this op-ed was published March 26 in the Sacramento Bee.
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/03/26/2634340/health-bill-will-only-entrench.html
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