The passage of the health insurance legislation has two overriding positive effects: it brings more clarity to the health insurance issue and it demonstrates the President's ability to govern.
The legislation also affirms that Americans should not face financial ruin from being unable to afford health insurance. It also makes good progress on prevention, on increasing the supply of health care professionals, on eliminating the flawed "doughnut hole" in the Medicare prescription drug system, and on beginning to address the long term care crisis. These are the good elements of this legislation.
As health insurance system restructuring, the legislation has deep flaws that must be addressed in subsequent legislation. We cannot guarantee coverage, prevent people from being subject to pre-existing condition exclusions, and prohibit insurers from canceling policies for those who become ill during the policy period without significantly increasing costs for all policyholders unless we cause healthy uninsured people to buy insurance, reduce what we pay health care providers, or levy more taxes on people to pay for increased subsidies.
The penalties for healthy people refusing to buy insurance are far too low and do not take effect for several years. Reducing payments to doctors and hospitals either drives them out of the system or causes them to drop Medicaid patients. Raising taxes on everyone to pay for these increased costs worsens our economic situation.
One situation illustrates my point: in the 8th Ward of Washington D.C., there is a severe shortage of specialists, including one urologist for a large population. Most people have health insurance or Medicaid. After this legislation passes, there will be even more people with insurance, but still a severe physician shortage. We have more work to do before our health care system is viable. Health insurance affordability does not produce health care access.
Wrong. I especially liked your list of important, influential people that want to endorse this hoax of a bill. LMFAO.
Here's a newsflash: every single individual citizen - including those too young to vote - are the most important and influential.
NEW: Health Care Mandates are Constitutional? Not Even Close
“The claim that the Founding Fathers would have thought the Constitution allows Congress to impose health care mandates is little short of absurd."
--Rob Natelson, Professor of Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Advanced Constitutional Law
http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2010/01/25/health-care-mandates-are-constitutional-not-even-close/
Our elected representatives could fix 90 percent of the problems with health insurance by ending the federal law allowing states to ban health insurance sales across state lines.
If we had a free market in health insurance, it would be inexpensive and easy to buy insurance for "pre-existing" conditions before they exist. The vast majority of "pre-existing" conditions that currently exist in a cramped, limited, heavily regulated insurance market would be "covered" conditions under a free market in health insurance.