Health Care Reform We Can All Read and Vote On
Why has health care reform become over a thousand pages of gobbledlygook? Why can’t it be something we can all read and understand, instead of getting our information from fearmongering distortions?
Hear it is, plain and simple (comments welcome – remember, the whole bill, including your changes, cannot go over two pages):
- An annual or lifetime cap on benefits
- An exclusion of benefits for pre-existing conditions
Purchasers of health insurance may not be denied the option to renew their policy for any reason other than non-payment of premiums. A minimum sixty day grace period must be offered before coverage can be cancelled for non-payment of premiums.
All health care insurance policies sold or issued in the United States of America must include the following:
- Pricing of premiums must be based on the risk factors for the population as a whole, not on the individual or group purchasing the policy.
- Annual wellness preventative care visits shall be covered with no cost to the insured.
- Children may stay on their parents’ health insurance policy until the first renewal after the child’s 26th birthday.
Medicare shall be open to enrollment to all legal residents of the United States. Premiums for those under age 65 shall be set so that the program covers its costs, including its share of administrative overhead as determined by share of claims processed. Congress may, at its discretion, provide subsidies for low income residents to afford coverage, and those subsidies shall be considered “premiums” in determining if the program has “covered its costs”.
Medicare is hereby authorized to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, living wills, hospice care and other issues, if the patient wants it.
Medicare is hereby authorized to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers on prices and establish its own prescription insurance plan(s).
Yes, I left the actual subsidies for universal coverage out of this bill. It is a separate issue. Lumping too much together is how we end up with thousand page bills that no one reads with ridiculous unintended consequences, some real and some imagined. This bill is one we don’t need Sarah Palin or Nancy Pelosi to interpret for us.