Simple Healthcare Bill Is What We Need
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The Senate, lead by Harry Reid, will start debate on the massive 2000+ page Healthcare Bill this week. It seems bigger is still better in Washington as Senator Harry Reid had to top the 1900+ page House of Representatives Bill with an even larger and harder to understand Bill of his own. Americans, both Republican and Democrat, agree that healthcare costs need to be lowered for all of us. Rising healthcare costs are a major concern for average people, but both versions of Healthcare Reform Bills suffer from skepticism from the general public. Americans are leery of these massive bills, as we have seen fraud and outright lies in regards to their success and average people wonder what kind of hidden payoffs are in their pages. The Economic Recovery Bill has been plagued with problems because of things like bonuses for executives that were in its massive amounts of pages. TARP has been riddled with problems because it was passed hastily by a Congress that “needed to act now” instead of logically evaluating the problem at hand and then deciding. There is a simple solution to healthcare that Americans would support.
We could make a great start in fixing healthcare with a bill that is less than one page long. First, take away the “pre- existing condition” clause from insurers. Second, require everybody to buy health insurance. Third, allow insurance companies to compete nationwide so that no insurance company would have a monopoly on a state. This simple three sentence bill would get the support of most of Americans. The Bill being debated in the Senate is sure to be full of loopholes and special gifts to certain Senators in order to buy their vote. One of the biggest problems with both healthcare bills is the “Government Option” ( No we won’t call it the sweet sounding “public option” here in order to make it sound better) and it is supposed to create competition in markets where only one or two insurance companies exist (states like Arkansas where Blue Cross has about 75% of the market). There is no need for a “government option”, if people are allowed to shop for insurance from any company in the US then that would create a lot of competition and thus drive down prices. Why is is that a “Government Option” is the only way to create competition? Auto insurance used to be higher in my State, but when it was deregulated we could shop around with more companies and thus my premiums went down. This would be the same for Health Insurance. No one believes that either the House or Senate Bills are cost neutral (A requirement of President Obama) as both bills took over 200 billion dollars out of the game by moving the “Doc Fix” out of both bills. This is like me saying I have a balanced household budget but only after I take my mortgage payment out of the talley. Healthcare can be fixed in a simple easy to understand manner and doesn’t need to be that complicated with over 1900 pages, that no one will read before voting on. I believe a simple bill like the one above would have the support of the majority of Americans and bipartisan support in Congress.
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