Posted on 10/23/2009 5:30:32 PM PDT by Steelfish
Who Picks Up The Tab For Health Reform? Insurance companies stand to lose; doctors look like winners
Jane Sasseen and Catherine Arnst
The odds are shifting in favor of health-care reform legislation making it through Congress this year, to the point where bookies could put money on the ultimate winners and losers. Many details have yet to be determined, as congressional leaders try to merge two Senate and three House proposals, all of them more than 1,000 pages long.
And beyond the contentious battle over the public insurance option, there's a huge fight over another question: Who will pay to cover the uninsured? It's safe to say doctors will give up the least, pharmaceutical and medical device makers will fall somewhere in the middle, and insurers will be the big losers.
Then there's the taxpayer. Senate Democrats want to levy a 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac plans, policies that cost more than $21,000 a year. Backers say the tax would bring in $215 billion, but unions are determined to block it, arguing that middle-income workers will get hit with the tax as well.
A fierce battle will erupt over the levy when the Senate and the House begin to work on the final bill. Meanwhile, the 85 percent of citizens with insurance of any kind, Cadillac or Hyundai, should probably assume that most costs levied on other parties to health reform will be passed along to them through higher premiums.
Most Washington observers now think the final bill will closely resemble the Senate Finance Committee proposal because it has a smidgen of bipartisan support, thanks to Senator Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. It also meets President Barack Obama's demands that a reform package cannot add to the federal deficit and the tab should come in at around $900 billion....
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Young healthy adults.
I hate the whole concept and hope it fails but there is some justice there given they are primarily the idiots who put obamuh in office.
Does anyone find it surprising that Business Week (the magazine) was on the market recently for effectively nothing - when you see that a major policy debate on healthcare was allowed to run this far before their journalistic curiosity even addressed “who pays”? Sheesh!
Nothing like a little real world experience. I hope it doesn't come to pass either..
BamaKennedy has already stated his purpose was to proscribe ‘pills’ instead of ‘procedures’ for old American grandmas.... Mao medicine anybody?
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