The President has stated in public forums that passage of Health Care Reform will make it illegal for insurance companies to drop you from your plan if you get sick and prevent you from being denied insurance due to a pre-existing medical condition. He also states that individuals are staying in jobs they don’t like just to keep their health care coverage.
Finding – FALSE
HIPAA legislation passed by a Republican congress in 1996 disallowed such practices by insurance companies. Under current law, insurance companies cannot cancel your coverage because you get sick. Additionally no matter who your insurer is, you can leave your job with full-blown cancer and buy an individual insurance policy without going through underwriting (you pay the premium of a healthy individual) as long as you buy that policy within 63 days of terminating your employment. Many think HIPAA is about privacy but in fact the thrust was Health Insurance Portability.
Granted, the final phase of HIPAA became effective in March of 2006 (privacy) but you would think that the federal government, and the president, would have some basic knowledge of laws already on the books which would preclude them from lying about proposed legislation.
The president, congressmen and federal bureaucrats state that the health care bill will not convey free, subsidized or any coverage at all to illegal aliens.
Finding – FALSE
While it is technically correct to say that the health care bill does not contain language conveying coverage to illegal aliens, such assertions are disingenuous. In 1982, the Supremes ruled in Plyler v. Doe that illegal aliens were entitled to 14th amendment equal protection under the law. Never mind that the 14th makes no such distinction. Illegal alien benefits have been the law of the land for 27 years. Passage of health care, with subsidies for low-income workers will, defacto, extend your tax supported coverage to illegal aliens.
Politicians say we need a government run health plan, which need not make a profit and has other tax advantages to compete with private for-profit health insurance companies and lower costs.
Finding – FALSE
Half of all health care insurance companies offering coverage in the U.S. now are non-profit companies, which need not make a profit and are exempt from most local and state taxes. The bulk of the rise in health care costs in the past 40 years is due to Congress’ intervention into the health care market via Medicare and Medicaid. Congress’ insistence on reimbursing health care providers at rates below the cost of the service being delivered caused unnecessary increases to be shifted over to paying customers. Expanding government’s presence in health care beyond the current level will leave no one to shift costs to, causing an overall increase, not decrease, in the cost of government provided health care.
Politicians insist that health care reform will not result in death panels that will pull the plug on grandma.
Finding – FALSE (Right church, wrong pew)
The so-called stimulus bill that Congress didn’t read established the foundation for panels to determine appropriate health care delivery. That law requires an electronic health file on every American by 2014 and sets up a 15-member panel for “Comparative Effective Research” (page 151) to determine health care outcomes and efficiencies. CER panels are the precursor necessary for establishing Quality-adjusted Life Years (QALY). QALY puts a value on each year of life ($49,500 in England) and then determines whether you have enough life years left to justify an expensive medical procedure to prolong your life.
So far, Democrats have defeated all proposed amendments to the current health bill that would prevent any CER-based analysis or other panel from making end of life decisions on behalf of patients.