If You Like Your Insurance....

You can keep it. On the other hand if you DON'T like your health insurance, you have to keep it. That is the rest of the sentence that the Dems leave out.

With the passage of this bill, control over your private insurance plan has now passed from the company that issued it to the Health and Human Services Chairman, Kathleen Sebelius, and a committee which is still to be formed. In the Senate version which was passed, if the insurance companies want to raise your rates, they must first get approval from this oversight group.

Want to change your policy? Say you want to add baby coverage since receiving news that a young one may be joining your family, you can't do it unless this committee says it is okay for your insurance company to change your policy.

Can't wait to get on that 'free' government insurance plan? Well first, the government needs to put the infrastructure in place to handle such a thing. That will take a couple of years. What's that you say? There is no provision in the bill for the government to issue health insurance? Actually there is. It is contained in these much bally-hooed cooperatives that they are talking about setting up.

Did you know the government will now tell your insurance company which procedures they must cover? So while the insurance companies will have to cover more things they will, on the other hand, be forbidden from raising rates. If they can't raise rates, that means they can not reimburse the medical providers as much, which will lead providers to either quit accepting some insurance plans, like they do Medicare and Medicaid today, or simply leaving the practice of medicine all together.

People in Tennessee will no doubt be thrilled to discover that the premiums they pay will now go to fund drug and alcohol rehab for celebrities in California. Want a sex change operation in Oregon? No problem, the few remaining employed people in Michigan will foot the bill.

The Law of Unintended Consequences will be in full effect with the passage of this legislation. There was an old saying that said you get what you pay for, so if something is free there ain't a whole lot you can complain about now, can you?

There is certainly going to be more and more fallout from the passage of the Progressive health care bill, and with each increasingly bad outcome the Democrats are going to insist the only answer is to have more government involvement, since their thinking always revolves around the mantra that programs fail not because of less government involvement, but rather because of a lack of control.

The businesses that will be hardest hit are those wishing to move up the food chain from a small company to a big company. As long as you stay at 99 employees you can avoid many of the penalties your bigger competitors face, but should you wish to grow you had better be prepared to go big or stay at home. You see, that big area of medium sized companies, those employing between 100-499 employees, are going to be hard hit. The net effect is companies will need to make the tough choice.

The key to all of this seems to be the timeline for the phase-in of the various components of this legislation, a schedule driven more by political considerations then by any sort of real world concern for how this will affect the economy or the average American. The good stuff is up front along with a few of the fees, but a big chunk won't happen until after 2012. The Dems probably realizing they will no longer be in power have set a time bomb for whoever is in charge after 2012 and, quite frankly, God help us all then.

Our health care system will now join the pantheon of other federal programs which have such stellar records like Social Security, Medicare, the Post Office, Amtrak, and even the Senate cafeteria. They all have one thing in common: They operate at a deficit.

The motto of any government program seems to be We may be inefficient, but we do it slowly.

You might say I have a little bit of knowledge on the subject since I do work for a health insurance company, and I have been so busy in the last few weeks answering requests for information from the HHS and various Democrat lawmakers, all designed to just put pressure on us, and reports which no doubt landed in the garbage without even being looked at and were little more then attempts at intimidation, which explains why I haven't posted much. I needed to avoid appearing to be a shill for the health insurance companies since it is obvious I had a big conflict of interest, something Congressmen are not bothered by. I am very far down the food chain, so don't get the idea that I was sitting on board meetings or anything remotely close. I am not in the inner circle. Just like I was in the Army, I am simply a grunt doing the work. I will probably have a lot of free time on my hands soon.

How long can I collect unemployment for again?

UPDATE: The always reliable guys over a TAH provide a link to how the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) were expressing concern about how veterans and the military in general are going to get screwed in this bill.

At issue is H.R. 4872 does not fully protect the healthcare programs provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the military’s Tricare system. Specifically, the bill covers Tricare For Life but not the other Tricare programs that serve millions of beneficiaries; it does not cover children suffering from spina bifida as a result of a parent’s exposure to Agent Orange; and it does not cover dependents, widows and orphans who are served by CHAMPVA, the Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs.