The Devil is Always in the Details

Americans need to start bracing themselves for the coming bloodbath in their healthcare and the manner in which they will be insured. The 2000+ pages of legislation was just the outline, and now the rules and regulations to back up the Democrats blueprint for government takeover of healthcare are starting to make their way out of the various committees and panels empowered to enact them and are coming to light.

The most significant event that will hit most people in the coming years is the fact that their employer will no longer cover their health insurance or help pay the cost. Most businesses have now reached the conclusion that it will be far more cost effective to drop the benefit and pay the fine. The one group that won't make this move of course is government--what Dems euphemistically call public sector--employees. Because of their marriage with the unions, those contracts can't be broken and as a result all of us will be on the hook to not only pay for their continuing health plans but will now have to foot more of the bill for our own health insurance. Remember, government can simply raise your taxes to pay for their lifestyle.

I want folks to remember that slogan "If you like your plan and doctor you can keep them" as these rules come to light.

The rules, released Monday, spell out when plans would lose their grandfathered status, including if they make major increases in premiums, modest increases in co-payments or significantly cut benefits. The administration estimates that half of all employers, including two-thirds of small employers, could lose their grandfathered status by 2013.

What is a modest increase in co-payments? $5. That's all.

If an insurance companies does any of the things cited above they face stiff penalties, which will, of course, cause more and more of the smaller insurance companies to go out of business and gradually it will move to the bigger companies as more and more employers opt out reducing the number of members that a health insurance company can rely on to help defray expenses.

Under the rules, health plans and employers would lose their "grandfathered" status if they:

* Significantly cut or reduced benefits such as eliminating coverage for people with diabetes or AIDS.

* Significantly raised co-payments or deductibles. Co-pays could not be increased by $5 or a medical inflation rate plus 15 percentage points, whichever is greater. Deductibles could not be raised by a percent equal to medical inflation plus 15 percentage points. Medical inflation has averaged 4 percent to 5 percent in recent years. Thus, a family with a $1,000 annual deductible could still see its deductible hiked to $1,200 and the plan keep its grandfathered status.

* Significantly lowered the portion of health coverage premium paid for by the employer. Grandfathered plans would not be allowed to decrease the amount by more than 5 percentage points.

The rules will be coming out little by little and go mostly unnoticed by the general population for a couple of years and then suddenly Americans will wake up one morning and wonder how did we get to this point where everybody is all of a sudden on some sort of government-administrated health plan and have to discover their latent abilities to perform minor surgery and treating their own broken bones since the wait at any healthcare facility will take too long for a plan of treatment to be of any good.


Who has ever heard of a "medical inflation rate"?