Rep. Heinrich and the Health Care Bill

Rep. Martin Heinrich voted in favor of the health care bill that narrowly passed the House over the weekend. He also wrote an opinion piece in the Albuquerque Journal defending the bill and his decision to support it. He points to six principles that he wanted included in the legislation:

1) Stability for health consumers; in practice, this means “guaranteed issue,” a practice that drives up the costs of health insurance for the young and healthy, thus driving them out of the insurance pool, driving costs up for everyone (as only the unhealthy will buy insurance) and pushing peopole into the so-called “public option.”

2) Contain costs: This from the National Taxpayers Union “Several analyses have placed the real cost at as much as $1.5 trillion over the first ten years, or more than $2 trillion over a decade when the bill is fully phased in. The House legislation used innumerable gimmicks to artificially reduce its score, including splitting the so-called “doc fix” into another bill to hide a quarter-trillion dollars and not indexing the taxes in the bill for inflation, meaning they’ll run deficits in the future if they don’t “fix” those provisions like they have to do with the Alternative Minimum Tax.”

3) Patients can keep their doctor and health plan. We already know this to be false. For starters, I hold a health savings account that I love. That plan will cease to exist under the House-passed plan.

4) Improving the quality of private insurance and closing Medicare Donut Hole; Oh, and I’m sure this will all come in at no additional cost to taxpayers, right?

5) Coverage for all Americans; Illegal immigrants are major consumers of uncompensated care, but they are not included in the legislation. How much of the uncompensated care will really go away?

6) Public option; Operating without government subsidy, but for how long? Will Congress really let the government option die if it can’t compete? No, they’ll eventually prop it up and you simply can’t write this legislation in such a way as to stop this from happening once you create the public option.