Health Care For America Now

Washington, DC – Health Care for America Now (HCAN) – the nation’s largest health care campaign – offers the following GOP to English translation of the new Republican health reform bill:

• Controlling costs = Allowing insurance companies to continue to deny people coverage for pre-existing conditions and charge higher premiums to people for having health conditions, being older, or simply being women. Encouraging the sale of barebones insurance plans with lousy benefits and high deductibles, plans that make insurance companies the most amount of money.
  
• Allow the sale of  insurance across state lines = Let health insurance companies set up shop in the states with the loosest regulations – exactly the same way credit card companies have – and guarantee people buying health insurance are no longer protected by their state’s laws.
  
• Have small businesses pool their resources to buy insurance as a group = Create new group purchasing pools that aren’t subject to state regulations. Let insurance companies refuse to cover people with pre-existing conditions, offer minimum benefits, and strip consumer appeals rights and protections.
  
• Direct federal funds to states that establish pools to defray the costs of covering the most high-risk individuals = Take the most expensive consumers, put them all in one pool, charge them whatever you want, and make the government pick up the tab on the taxpayers’ dime. Insurance companies make more money by cherry-picking the youngest and healthiest and then dropping them when they become older and sicker and too expensive to cover.
  
• Won’t end insurance industry practices that discriminate against high-risk individuals = You can still be denied coverage for insurance company-defined pre-existing conditions, and insurance companies can still drop your coverage when you get sick.
  
• Won’t provide tax credits to help the uninsured purchase coverage = Coverage too expensive? Tough. You’re on your own.