The bill coming out of the Senate Finance committee mandates everyone to have health insurance, and even has teeth — a fine if you fail to have insurance. But no provisions to control costs, so now the health insurance companies will be able to charge whatever they want (like they do now), but you will have no choice but to pay it, or pay a hefty fine. What a lovely gift to the insurance industry.
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The ‘free-market’ paradox: government deregulation of the market leading to the market’s regulation of government.
It’s too bad. The Baucus Bill (like TARP) has some genuinely good elements to it but has doomed itself by not going far enough in regulating the oligarchs who’re responsible for this mess.
If Sen. Baucus didn’t want a public option, an alternative would have been instituting price controls (which is what Japan and Germany do to solve the cost problem, and which FDR would’ve had no problems doing 60 years ago). Instead, what we get is something eerily similar to what we currently have in Massachusetts: a compromise bill that, in order to appear cheaper, does very little to slow the reduce the growth of future health spending.
What’s strange to me is that we still only get about 60% voter turnout in our national elections. How bad do things have to get before even 80% of people come out and vote? It seems more and more that we’re truly a crisis-driven country…