@Jason:

OK, so, just exactly what is it that’s “misleading” about this statement?

The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,” the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states:

“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=332548165656854

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@MataHarley:

Just to elaborate on what you merely implied, as the uniformed, and/or uninformed reader may need to have it ‘splained to him.

After a period of time, private insurers will be driven out of the market by requiring all NEW insurance to be through the sate. When a business has no new customers, and the older ones are lost to attrition, then even if it’s “legal” for some people to retain their coverage, the insurers won’t be around any more, so the end is the same.

And don’t forget what Obama says about “hard choices” when grandma requires tens, or hundreds of thousands of dollars of care, and the system is bankrupt, well, if they can’t figure out where that’s going, they are pretty stupid. Alternatively, they may not care, which is far worse than stupidity.

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WHAT ELSE DO YOU EXPECT FROM A SOCIALIST?

“A July 15 editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, “It’s Not an Option”, revealed that the healthcare reform bill the House passed contains ‘a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal’.”
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2009/07/healthcare-reform-sanctions-torture.html

Oh, yeah, this is gonna be a snap for government to administer…
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2009/07/your-easy-guide-to-democrat-health.html
…riiiiiiiiight!

Now, we just have to hope the “health” care fiasco won’t be as big a “success” as the Stinkulus Expendaganza.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a0StZd9y2rCY

…because for the Obamacrats, “SUCCESS IS NOT AN OPTION!”

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I only have one question for the left. If this is the bestest healthcare bill evah, why is congress opting out? Why is congress exempt from this or any other law they pass? Why?

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@trizzlor:

While I’m not advocating for this particular plan, a massive amount of reform is certainly necessary.

Absolutely agree on reform

When I was a teenager I thought seat-belt laws were absurd – what right does the government have to dictate my own safety? As I got older, I learned about “externalities”, and how high the government cost is to clean someone’s brains off the highway because they weren’t buckled and insured. Now I don’t complain.

Should I follow this logic all the way through (on the safety part)? If you are concerned about how much it costs for the government to clean up road-brains, and you aren’t the least bit concerned about the price tag of not only this FIRST stimulus package, but also socialized health care, there is a huge disconnect in your reasoning abilities in this. We could end up owing almost 2 trillion (or more) before Obama is even done with his first year! The only thing liberals have constantly reinforced to me is: Big Government is Great! Unless of course it puts them in jail, keeps them from smoking weed, does not allow them to get married to their gay friend (thats right, Obama is against it), and makes them pay more money. What? Does that really make sense at all?!

Lastly, tell me any program that the government runs better and more efficiently than the private sector? Keep in mind, this all has to be for the benefit of the country, correct? So what happens when all of a sudden government ends up being overwhelmingly conservative republicans that disagree with the socialized plan? Would this system then suffer and end up costing us even more?

If the current administration really cared about the direction of this country, they would use a /lot/ more discretion about the packages they are pushing through. We all know the ‘transparent’ government thing is bull. But at the very minimum, there needs to be a little more thought into the HUGE, long term plans that are being rushed through the whitehouse. I heard Old Man Wisdom lived there once, but now he just jet sets around the world.

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@trizzlor: I am so thrilled that you are in such good financial shape that you can endure the added burden of higher taxes to pay for the dubious quality of care that the few currently uninsured that will be helped by Obama care will receive.

What a shame you don’t currently take that money and help those family and friends who need it instead of demanding the government force the rest of us to pay into a system we find morally reprehensible.

Obama care will NOT solve the health care problems of the uninsured and will make health care for all of us more expensive at a lower quality.

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Trizzlor said; “@liam09 & Ryan: Show me a major corporation where the executives actually read the contracts that they sign. Management goes to school for years to learn how to manage, lawyers learn to understand the documents, statisticians learn to interpret the data and make predictions – all of these people work together specifically to prevent one person from reading the bill. If you can’t understand the divide between specialization and management then you shouldn’t be restructuring the government.”

Yeah, apparently you didn’t read my comment. Now if you have a team reading the comments on this blog and explaining it to you like the Congressmen and women have to “interpret” the bills to them, then your team failed you miserably and they need to take a bloody English class(sarcasm).

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Stuck in the filter P&T.

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This is copy and paste will also add some bolding:

Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these “qualified plans.” If you now get your plan through work, your employer has a five-year “grace period” to switch you into a qualified plan. If you buy your own insurance, you’ll have less time.

And as soon as anything changes in your contract — such as a change in copays or deductibles, which many insurers change every year — you’ll have to move into a qualified plan instead (House bill, p. 16-17).

When you file your taxes, if you can’t prove to the IRS that you are in a qualified plan, you’ll be fined thousands of dollars — as much as the average cost of a health plan for your family size — and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan (House bill, p. 167-168).

It’s one thing to require that people getting government assistance tolerate managed care, but the legislation limits you to a managed-care plan even if you and your employer are footing the bill (Senate bill, p. 57-58). The goal is to reduce everyone’s consumption of health care and to ensure that people have the same health-care experience, regardless of ability to pay.

Nowhere does the legislation say how much health plans will cost, but a family of four is eligible for some government assistance until their household income reaches $88,000 (House bill, p. 137). If you earn more than that, you’ll have to pay the cost no matter how high it goes.

The price tag for this legislation is a whopping $1.04 trillion to $1.6 trillion (Congressional Budget Office estimates). Half of the tab comes from tax increases on individuals earning $280,000 or more, and these new taxes will double in 2012 unless savings exceed predicted costs (House bill, p. 199). The rest of the cost is paid for by cutting seniors’ health benefits under Medicare.

There’s plenty of waste in Medicare, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates only 1 percent of the savings under the legislation will be from curbing waste, fraud and abuse. That means the rest will likely come from reducing what patients get.

One troubling provision of the House bill compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years (and more often if they become sick or go into a nursing home) about alternatives for end-of-life care (House bill, p. 425-430). The sessions cover highly sensitive matters such as whether to receive antibiotics and “the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration.”

This mandate invites abuse, and seniors could easily be pushed to refuse care. Do we really want government involved in such deeply personal issues?

Shockingly, only a portion of the money accumulated from slashing senior benefits and raising taxes goes to pay for covering the uninsured. The Senate bill allocates huge sums to “community transformation grants,” home visits for expectant families, services for migrant workers — and the creation of dozens of new government councils, programs and advisory boards slipped into the last 500 pages.

The most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll (June 21) finds that 83 percent of Americans are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their health care, and 81 percent are similarly satisfied with their health insurance.

They have good reason to be. If you’re diagnosed with cancer, you have a better chance of surviving it in the United States than anywhere else, according to the Concord Five Continent Study. And the World Health Organization ranked the United States No. 1 out of 191 countries for being responsive to patients’ needs, including providing timely treatments and a choice of doctors.
Congress should pursue less radical ways to cover the uninsured. We have too much to lose with this legislation.

Betsy McCaughey is founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former lieutenant governor of New York. betsy@hospitalinfection.org

http://www.nypost.com/seven/07172009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_broken_promises_179667.htm

Betsy McCaughey has studied this fiasco from the beginning, unlike members of Congress, she has read everything.

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Mata and Karen, unless you’re proposing no regulation of health-care whatsoever, you need to show something more than conjecture for why this increase in regulation is going to bankrupt insurance companies and provide inferior care. As for the debate, Jason’s putting it bluntly, but the fact is there could be a debate about this policy if everyone wasn’t blowing so much smoke with half-quotes and exaggerations. I think it’s fair to correct these simple points before getting into the predictions of economic collapse and such. Of course, the broken telephone got all the way to Hannity tonight, who was wailing about how “government will ban private coverage from day one”.

liam: While I’m not advocating for this particular plan, a massive amount of reform is certainly necessary. We spend significantly more on health-care than other countries while getting inferior or equivalent care. Perhaps you know some Canadians that are flooding to the borders, but non-anecdotal polls show that they’re happier with their coverage than we are. Many people flock to Israel for their superior care even though they have socialized health-care, does that make it the right choice (actually, Israel has the best public/private balance I’ve seen, but their private organizations are non-profits)? Likewise, about the same number of people don’t get treatment in Canada because of those wait-times everyone’s talking about as don’t get treatment here because they can’t afford it. And all this with lower overall spending. Lastly, around 3/4ths of the US feels it important that government offer a public option [CBS, WSJ].

Is it fair to force all people to have medical insurance?

Yes it is, when lack of insurance costs the government in emergency and other indirect fees. When I was a teenager I thought seat-belt laws were absurd – what right does the government have to dictate my own safety? As I got older, I learned about “externalities”, and how high the government cost is to clean someone’s brains off the highway because they weren’t buckled and insured. Now I don’t complain.

Mike:

You are going to pay HIGHER TAXES to cover those costs.

Yes, and considering my bracket and state it’s going to be quite a hike. At the same time, a lot of my friends & family who are uninsured won’t have to lose their job or drop out of business school if they get injured because the government is making an investment in them. I’m quite comfortable with that trade.

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