The President's Proposal adopts the Senate approach but lowers the flat dollar assessments, and raises the percent of income assessment that individuals pay if they choose not to become insured. Specifically, it lowers the flat dollar amounts from $495 to $325 in 2015 and $750 to $695 in 2016. Subsequent years are indexed to $695 rather than $750, so the flat dollar amounts in later years are lower than the Senate bill as well. The President's Proposal raises the percent of income that is an alternative payment amount from 0.5 to 1.0% in 2014, 1.0 to 2.0% in 2015, and 2.0 to 2.5% for 2016 and subsequent years - the same percent of income as in the House bill, which makes the assessment more progressive. For ease of administration, the President's Proposal changes the payment exemption from the Senate policy (individuals with income below the poverty threshold) to individuals with income below the tax filing threshold (the House policy). In other words, a married couple with income below $18,700 will not have to pay the assessment. The President's Proposal also adopts the Senate's "hardship" exemption.

Maybe it's selfish of me but, I want to know How Much it will COST me -- and what I'll get.

The way they write these proposals it's really difficult to tell.

The Senate bill includes a "grandfather" policy that allows people who like their current coverage, to keep it. Within months of legislation being enacted, it requires plans to cover adult dependents up to age 26, prohibits rescissions, mandates that plans have a stronger appeals process, and requires State insurance authorities to conduct annual rate review, backed up by the oversight of the HHS Secretary.

...from $23,000 for a family plan to $27,500 and starting it in 2018 for all plans." For singles, it is $10,500. (Why are singles always discriminated against?)

What discrimination?  A family plan to cover six people will pay the tax at less than $5,000 a head, where the tax does not hit a single until $10,500.  

"Soaring costs laid to growing power of medical cartels"

Feb. 21 2010, San Francisco Chronicle
by
Carolyn Lochhead and Victoria Colliver

The planned spike in health insurance rates by Anthem Blue Cross in California is just the tip of a Titanic-size iceberg of exorbitant price increases, secret pricing and consolidation not only by insurers - but by the hospitals, doctors and medical devicemakers that send the bills to the insurers.

Insurers, who strike deals with providers, pass the bills on to patients, businesses and governments. The nation is fast being bankrupted by a medical money machine that costs $2.5 trillion a year and takes more than $1 of every $6 that Americans earn.

"It's an insider's game in health care," said Jeffrey Lerner, president and chief executive of the ECRI Institute, a nonprofit that researches medical practices.

Anthem, a subsidiary of WellPoint Inc., has come under state and federal scrutiny for its plan to raise rates by as much as 39 percent for many of its 700,000 California members who buy individual coverage. The company blames the increases on healthy individual policyholders who have dropped out of the market, creating a pool of sicker people.

The company said it will delay the rate hikes until May 1 to allow a state review. Hearings are planned in Sacramento and Washington, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a report Thursday that found double-digit premium hikes in California and a half-dozen other states.

While the Anthem case has raised a political storm, the underlying surge in costs gets far less scrutiny. But each sector of the health industry points fingers at the other for driving up prices, and all are raking in money.

Insurers blame hospitals and doctors, doctors blame insurers, and hospitals blame doctors and medical devicemakers in what academics call an inscrutable medical-industrial complex that rivals anything the defense industry ever invented. All these groups are combining into what many experts describe as cartels.

Many industry insiders are afraid to speak on the record for fear of antagonizing the medical groups they rely on for their survival. Contracting practices are draped in secrecy. Prices are almost impossible to obtain because of "confidentiality agreements" among hospitals, physician groups, insurers and devicemakers who do not want their markups exposed to competition or public scrutiny.

Christina Bernstein, a medical-device engineer and independent sales representative based in San Francisco, sells disposable surgical tools made mostly out of plastic that she estimates are manufactured for about $40 each. These are marked up and sold to hospitals for as much as $350, she said, for a single use in a surgery on a patient.

"But if you were to get a detailed bill of what the hospital was charging the insurance company for the insured patient, those things get marked up to something like $1,200," Bernstein said. "It's ridiculous. There's no open competition."

With doctors and hospitals sprinkled in every congressional district and wielding their clout, a year of health reform in Congress has overlooked some of the biggest cost drivers in American medicine.

Let's blow through the smoke and mirrors and see what this bill actually does:

[1] This bill does not end discrimination due to pre-existing conditions. Instead, it allows insurers to throw people paying enrolees off the insurance rolls by permitting insurers to dump people for "fraud." And what's one of the definitions of fraud?  Not disclosing to the insurer that you have pre-existing condition...even if you were unaware of it.

Presto!  Change-o!  You come down with some illness, and the insurance company doctor determines you had it but never notified your insurer. Whoops!  You're dumped from the insurance rolls!  Say hello to discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions, just under another name.

[2] The senate HCR bill "expands" Medicaid in name only. What it actually does is to dump 15 million more people onto state-funded Medicaid at the very time all the states are slashing their Medicaid outlays in every way possible. This is another scam -- a classic con game of 3-card monte. Claim the federal government will expand Medicaid, then dump the uninsurable sick people onto state Medicaid programs which are getting slashed right and left. Give lip service to increased federal funding of medicaid, while actually declaring a budget freeze (as Obama has just done).  Net result? Instead of uninsurable sick people blowing the roof off the federal deficit, they'll merely blow the roof off individual state deficits. Naturally, states are prevented by law from running continuing deficits so they'll be forced to shut down their Medicaid programs. Presto! Change-o!  Like homeless people rousted by the police and moved from one jurisdiction to another, those 15 million uninsurable new sick people will get magically removed from the federal rolls and dumped onto the state Medicaid rolls...except the states will dump 'em 'cause they don't have the money to pay for it. End result: same situation we've got now. The senate HCR bill is a scam, nothing more.

"Facing relentless fiscal pressure and exploding demand for government health care, virtually every state is making or considering substantial cuts in Medicaid, even as Democrats push to add 15 million people to the rolls."

Source: New York Times article States Consider Medicaid Cuts As Use Grows, 18 February 2010.

[3] Proponent after proponent of the senate HCR bill has claimed that this bill does not force individuals to buy health care, and they're lying. With a threshold for the excise tax of $10,500 per year, even the lowliest Wal*Mart employee will be forced to pay the excise tax because they can't afford the health insurance. So the senate HCR "reform" bill won't provide health care for most of the 43 million uninsured people...but it will reduce their income. This HCR bill is the most punitively repressive legislation ever introduced in American history -- it is, in fact, a fine for being poor.

Never before in American history has the full power of the U.S. government been used to fine people for the crime of being poor. That's unprecedented.

But wait...it gets better!

[4] The Congressional Budget Office has run the numbers and concluded that the "cadillac tax" (misnamed because the so-called "cadillac HCR plans" are merely plans which offer decent reasonable health benefits) will crush 1 out of 5 families earning between $50,000 and $75,000 per year by larding on an extra tax on their health insurance.

"The Senate's health benefits excise tax would impact 27% of families and 22% of individual plans by 2019 according to the Joint Committee on Taxation," Courtney said, "and those numbers would just increase."

Senate Plan To Tax Health Plans Is Bad Policy

[5] The language in the HCR bill is lying outright when it claims "The Act promotes innovation and saves consumers money. It ends anti-competitive behavior by drug companies that keep effective and affordable generic drugs off the market. It extends drug discounts to hospitals and communities that serve low-income patients. And it creates a pathway for the creation of generic versions of biological drugs so that doctors and patients have access to effective and lower cost alternatives."

This language lies because the primary cause of the skyrocketing medical costs is the network of collusive anti-competitive cartels linking doctors and hospitals and insurers and medical devicemakers in a dense mafia-like web of secret non-disclosure agreements (medical omerta) and sweetheart special deals (hospitals are contractually prevented from using lower-cost drugs or lower-cost doctors or lower-cost tests, insurers are contractually prevented from using lower-cost hospitals and doctors, and so on).

So each of the examples above is invalid because the generic cheaper drugs will never get used, since the hospitals and doctors will be contractually prevented from using them. Likewise, hospitals that serve low-income communities won't be able to take advantage of those drug discounts, because those hospitals will also be contractually prevented from using lower-cost alternative medicines by the sweetheart contracts locking them into monopolistic cartels of big pharma drug makers. Finally, the "pathway for the creation of generic biological drugs" will go unused because the drug companies will merely change one molecule in the drug and then re-patent the new version, at the same time requiring their captive doctors and hospitals to use the new patented high-cost drug and contractually preventing them from using the lower-cost generic version. This already happens, so it's nothing new or exotic.

None of the features of the HCR bill eliminate the anti-competitive monopolistic cartels and secret price lock-in contracts discussed in the San Francisco Chronicle article. On the contrary: the current HCR bill will greatly worsen the current monopolistic web of cartels because it will force all Americans to buy insurance from these anti-competitive cartels, creating a helpless captive market.