Fix Health Care Policy

Yesterday, President Obama tried to quiet growing concern by Americans over health care reform. He said, “For all the chatter and the yelling and the shouting and the noise, what you need to know is this … if you do have health insurance, we will make sure that no insurance company or government bureaucrat gets between you and the care you need.”

This appears to be another promise that President Obama will have a hard time keeping under the bills moving through Congress. Ed Haislmaier, Senior Research Fellow in the Center for Health Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, points out in a recent paper that “Both the pending House health care bill and Senate HELP Committee bill include provisions that would, if enacted, result in sweeping, complex, and highly discretionary new federal regulation of health insurance.”

That doesn’t sound like less government interference… that sounds like more.

Haislmaier continues…

Indeed, both bills set forth the basic components of a standardized benefit package while giving HHS the task of promulgating further specific requirements under each of the basic categories. This grant of authority is broad enough that the secretary of HHS would be able to specify through federal regulations not only specific items and services than must be covered but also the minimum frequency or duration of a required covered service and the maximum allowable patient cost sharing.

In the end, as Haislmaier points out, “…many of the provisions would make the current situation worse either by driving costs higher or by encouraging more employers and individuals to drop coverage.”

To learn more about the health care bills, go to FixHealthCarePolicy.com

Tags: health reform, House Bill, Senate Bill