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.
Michael,
As with sausage, this legislation will be most appealing when fully cooked...and it isn't even in the skillet yet. As usual, you are right...that the "gaming" by practioners will continue if unenforced, and if kept unduly complicated. The key to reimbursment coding "games" is in assigning the appropriate (and defensible) diagnosis codes. Docs can too often blame their $10/hour staff for using the wrong billing code...but they have no defense in using the wrong diagnosis code that comes only from the docs lips. Even Doctor Nip&Tuck knows what is cosmetic and what is reconstructive. That's where our Medicare police need to concentrate. With pending new cuts in Medicare reimbursement now slated for 1Q2010, the pressure will even highten for unscrupulous practices to cheat...and even more the need to tighten the controls that are needed to curtail costs at the point of delivery.
Follow the money trail. It's blazed not with crumbs...but with cash!