You had to be hiding under a rock not to see it coming: The huge wave of smaller-government sentiment that crashed down on the Washington establishment has been building for a long time, picking up steam with each passage of legislation that expanded government’s encroachment into the lives of the American people.Central to all of this has been the controversy surrounding health care reform.
How Will Health Care Reform Be Affected by a Republican Majority?
The question that has surfaced even before the votes were counted is whether the new Republican led House will act on its threat to force the repeal or defunding of health care reform. Tea Party backed Republicans have declared their election to Congress as a mandate by the electorate to take immediate steps to repeal or substantially change the Act.
Demoralized Democrats fight to Uphold Health Care Reform
The demoralized Democrats, including the Administration, have a more tempered view that sees the election results as the public’s insistence that there be less partisanship Congress and more cooperation between the Administration and Republicans on policies needed to get the economy moving again. The reality may lie somewhere in between, but that is not going to slow the efforts of the new Republican leadership to press forward on the dismantling of health care reform.
Can the GOP Actually End Health Reform?
The basic math would say no. While the Republican-led House can pass legislation to repeal, the Senate, where the Democrats will hold a 53 to 47 edge, is less likely to muster the votes to pass similar legislation. Even if the a few embattled Senate Democrats were lured over to the Republican side, there would not be enough of the 66 votes required to overcome a Presidential veto. Most political observers agree that such an effort would not have a chance of success until 2012 with a change of parties in the White House.
This is not likely to dissuade the new Tea Party infused blood in the House as even the Republicans have been put on notice that the electorate expects action quickly and often on reigning in government and spending. We can expect “dead-end” repeal legislation to be introduced and passed soon after the new session begins. And, as quickly as it dies, another piece of legislation will take its place.
The more feasible track will be the defunding effort that will take place as components of the Act are brought up for implementation funding. The House can simply hold up funding by refusing appropriations or tying things up in committee hearings. While this is a slower process, it can also inflict a lot more pain by drawing out all of the Act’s flaws holding them up to public scrutiny, which never really occurred during its backdoor passage.
We can also expect many committee hearings and investigations, led by new Republican leadership, to delve into the process by which the bill was passed as well as the constitutionality of the bureaucratic mechanisms that have been created to implement and enforce the Act.
In the end, the Affordable Health Care Act may not be repealed during this current session of Congress, but it will be starved, scrutinized and assaulted in such a way that it will remain as a political ball and hammer for pro-reform candidates in the next election.
photo credit: JosephLeonardo
Right on the heels of their successful repeal vote, House Republicans have introduced a bill that would allow interstate sales of health insurance. This has long been a main plank in the Republicans alternative health reform plan and the debate on its viability has been split pretty much along party lines with Democrats largely opposing it. We’ll examine the arguments for and against in subsequent columns, however, this is a brief overview from the perspective of the bill’s authors.
In what could trigger the first public confrontation between the Department of Health and Human Services and a major health insurer, Blue Shield of California has taken the brazen step of announcing a series of rate increases that will amount to a nearly 60% increase for individuals. Citing increasing health care costs and the mounting financial pressure of implementing Obamacare, Blue Shield is proposing a three-tiered increase to take effect over the next five months that will impact nearly 200,000 policyholders.
The American lifestyle encourages us to make a lot from a little. Wall Street is the product of this mentality. Is it fair then, that our insurance companies are controlled by a system that is designed to get the most from doing the least? Medicine as we know it today is unlike the medicine of even thirty years ago. In the 1980s, medical insurance went public and the whole game changed. Health insurance is now controlled by huge, publicly traded, for-profit companies. The medical field of the 21st century has both pros and cons.
To say that 2010 was a transformative year for health care would be the understatement of the year. Obamacare is nine months old and only five provisions were implemented this year, with most of the key provisions scheduled for implementation over the next eight years. Yet, we have already seen some seismic shifts in a health care system that seems to be bracing for all of the worst case scenarios that the hastily passed law could bring to businesses, medical costs, insurance costs, medical access, and anyone who has a health insurance plan. So far, the unintended consequences of the health care reform law have dominated the outcomes of the law’s enactment driving more people to the side of the repeal proponents.
Over the last decade, a major shift has occurred that has consumers more engaged in managing their own health care costs. The advent of Health Savings Accounts (HSA) coupled with High Deductible Health Insurance Plans (HDHP), an increasingly popular health insurance plan, has created a wave of consumer price consciousness in the realm of health care and medical services. The notion of “price shopping” medical services, once thought impractical or even impossible, is fast becoming the norm for millions of Americans who finally understand that they have some “skin in the game.”
