Stand Aside US Senate and Let the House Reform Health Care with HR 3200

hhttp://documents.nytimes.com/baucus-proposal-to-overhaul-health-care#p=4

The good Senator Baucus has shown America his hand at the table of Health Care reform, and progressive constituents are not impressed. This bill offers no public option (a catch phrase whose complete meaning has yet to be fully evaluated), and it does nothing to regulate the for profit, private, multi-payer, health insurance industry.

Here is a copy of the current text of the bill titled Chairman's Mark America's Healthy Future Act of 2009. I was not able to pull a copy from the thomas.loc.gov.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/11382446/Baucus-Health-Care-Bill---Full-Text

Here is what the Insurance Journal thinks of this bill.

http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2009/09/16/103810.htm

I am very disturbed that the Insurance Journal describes the bill in these terms

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D,Mont.)
today introduced the America's Healthy Future Act, landmark health care reform legislation to lower costs and provide quality, affordable health care coverage. The Chairman's Mark will make it easier for families and small businesses to buy health care coverage, ensure Americans can choose to keep the health care coverage they have if they like it and slow the growth of health care costs over time. It will bar insurance companies from discriminating against people based on health status, denying coverage because of preexisting conditions, or imposing annual caps or lifetime limits on coverage. The bill
would improve the way the health care system delivers care by improving efficiency, quality, and coordination. The $856 billion dollar package will not add to the federal deficit. The Finance Committee will meet to begin voting on the Chairman's Mark next week.

Point of fact: this bill does not "bar insurance companies from discriminating against people based on health status, denying coverage because of preexisting conditions, or imposing annual caps or lifetime limits on coverage." As with most Senate bills introduced in advance of actual House legislation, it outlines in flowery terms the proposed wishes of the Senate.

The House, and only the House will get to the guts of the language and address reform in line by line legislative reform. I admire the late Senator Ted Kennedy, but even his legislation amounts to little more than a directive to the House as regards relevant legislation.

At a mere two hundred and twenty-three pages, this bill does nothing to close the loop holes in current health insurance regulation - loop holes used by health insurers to hack and slash distribution of benefits to policy holders in such a way as to benefit top executives and the all mighty shareholder.

H.R. 3200, long and verbose, was crafted to address, line by painful line, the loopholes in the federal tax codes, the social security act, and the Public Health Service Act. We may crave the simpler version, but it our salvation lies in the mind numbing details of the more compplex House resolution.

Senator Baucus' bill references HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), a bill, which in content and in spirit appears to protect the ability of health insurers to convolute the process of health care more than it protects the rights of the patient or claimant.

http://www.cms.hhs.gov/HIPAAGenInfo/Downloads/HIPAALaw.pdf

If asked, most health care professionals associate HIPAA with patient privacy as opposed to any meaningful regulation of health insurers. In short HIPAA is what we study in the heath care industry when we need to know what information is shared between what agencies in what capacity.

HIPAA and the Gramm Leach Bliley Act of 19
are very similar both in spirit and in content.

http://banking.senate.gov/conf/

Both spend inordinate amounts of time and legal language to explain the rights of the average person to have their personal information guarded, yet do little to explain why that personal information need be guarded in the first place. HIPAA, to my mind, was the precursor to Gramm Leach Bliley of 1999. HIPAA was necessary to allow insurance agencies to access your credit information as a means to gauge how much they could charge you for your insurance premiums, even as Gramm Leach Bliley 1999 was needed to allow investors to blur the lines of banking so that they could issue loans to individuals based not on ability to pay, but ability to sell or flip properties. The two bills were orchestrated in the same cultural mindset, and the damage inflicted on the public by both has yet to be fully realized.

As Americans, pondering the ramifications of health care reform, we must continue to focus on the dollar. Health insurers want to continue to funnel profits from insurance premiums to either their direct shareholders or to the larger umbrella organizations of which they are a smaller part. We, as payers of premiums, must insist that our rights be held sacrosanct above those of the share holder and CEO.

H.R. 3200 holds the greatest hope for meaningful health insurance reform. Without this reform, no public options can be truly effective, and certainly any hope of a single payer system can prevail. Every tactic thus employed by the conservative right has been to deflect our attention from this House bill. Contact your state Senator and House of Representative and tell them to tell the US Senator and House of Representative that the citizens of Alaska want HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM. Tell them why in no uncertain terms and let them know that their interest and action on your behalf amounts to a vote to keep them in office. Contact Mr. Don Young and tell him that you do not support his alternative bills (which he no longer officially claims to cosponsor), and want him to vote for HR 3200, and any other legislation that opts for significant health insurance regulation, public options or a single payer system.