The insurance companies are popping corks as they prepare to welcome millions of new policy holder, billions in premiums and quickly transfer middle class worker’s salary and tax subsidies . . . wait for it . . . INTO THEIR OWN POCKETS.

The Senate bill transfers money – mandates money – to the insurance industry. It does not provide access to health care.  It provides “health insurance,” which is the name of a product that becomes more and more unrelated to the concept of “access to health care” with each annual rise in premiums, with each annual new set of benefit exclusions, with each new annual removal of medications from coverage, with each new annual dis-allowance of covered treatment options and with every single guaranteed annual rise in co-pays, out-of-pocket requirements and general rationing of providers and treatment options.

The following comments are taken liberally from Jon Walker’s excellent analysis on this subject.

The sole defense of this massive corporate giveaway, formally known as the Senate health care reform bill, is that it would still do some “good,” helping millions of the uninsured.

This is false.

The Senate Health Insurance Bill dramatically worsens the quality of current insurance coverage for tens of millions Americans, thanks to the new excise tax on insurance plans. The remaining “good,” what actually stays, does not outweigh the massive amount of harm. The remaining “good” is ultimately priced out the average patient’s ability to pay for it.

The “help” in the Senate bill is defined as giving insufficient subsides to Americans who are now forced to buy extremely expensive, poorly regulated, junk insurance.  Any purported “regulations” on policy holder payments above the cost of insurance are meaningless without banning annual limits and NO out-of-pocket caps/ (the “cap” language does not actually cap anything – it’s not even a loophole it’s a massive license to the exact opposite of what the alleged stated purpose – banning limits – actually is). The “Ban on Limits” law is a license cut off payments. Sounds like a limiting green light to me.  

As a result, mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a family with a one-year major illness from being bankrupted by accumulated medical debt.

As a result, mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a family from being bankrupted by a single family member with a chronic illness.  

As a result, mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a family from being bankrupted if a single family member has a major injury that requires multiple treatments and surgeries over more than one calendar year.

Insurance that does not protect you from financial ruin if you get sick makes is a mockery of the entire concept health insurance.

Mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a person or family from being bankrupted by health care costs.  All mandated coverage does is mandate coverage.  It does not mandate ACCESS to health care.

Mandated coverage and access to health care are unrelated subjects under the current private health insurance regime in the United States.

— Below — The harm of the Senate tax on middle class health care access is enormous.

The harm the excise tax on employer-provided insurance benefits will do is enormous. The health care bill is designed with the goal of making millions of middle class Americans’ health insurance coverage much worse. That is not a bug, it is a feature of the Senate version.

The excise tax is meant to force your employer to cut back your insurance benefits, reduce your coverage, and increase your co-pays and deductibles. This is a fact established by insurance company conduct, the structure of their plans and IT IS THE CONCLUSION OF THE NON-PARTISAN Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Congress’ own financial analysis found:

   [A]n estimated 19 percent of workers with employment-based coverage would be affected by the excise tax. . .  Those individuals who kept their high-premium policies would pay a higher premium than under current law, with the difference in premiums roughly equal to the amount of the tax. However, CBO and JCT estimate that most people would avoid the cost of the excise tax by enrolling in plans that had lower premiums; those reductions would result from choosing plans that either pay a smaller share of covered health care costs (which would reduce premiums directly as well as indirectly by leading to less use of covered medical services), manage benefits more tightly, or cover fewer services.

The CMS’s analysis showed that:

In reaction to the tax, many employers would reduce the scope of their health benefits. The resulting reductions in covered services and/or increases in employee cost-sharing requirements would induce workers to use fewer services. Because plan benefit values would generally increase faster than the threshold amounts for defining high-cost plans (which are indexed by the CPI plus 1 percent), over time additional plans would become subject to the excise tax, prompting those employers to scale back coverage.

To translate, the Senate middle class tax on health care coverage will effectively force employers to scale back the health insurance benefits they offer in order to avoid the excise tax. This can be done by reducing what benefits the plan covers and/or increasing cost sharing (i.e. higher co-pays, higher deductibles, higher out-of-pocket limits, and possibly lower annual limits). If you have a good employer provided health insurance plan, it will be dramatically scaled back. Contrary to Obama’s direct promise, you will not be able to keep the coverage you currently have, and that is by design of the Senate tax on middle class health care coverage.

One critical problem with this excise tax, which goes to what are misleadingly dubbed “Cadillac” plans, is that it is not indexed to health care inflation. After a short period, it will force employers to make the vast majority of employer-provided health insurance plans much worse. A decade after the coverage mandate and tax take hold, most Americans will have much worse health insurance coverage as a result.

Instead of paying for reform with a tax on the richest one percent of Americans, like the House bill, the Senate bill pays for reform by worsening the insurance coverage for the vast majority of Americans.

Ruining the coverage of most working class Americans to get the money for a huge corporate boondoggle that will only enrich the insurance companies while not stopping medical bankruptcy in this country does not sound like a good trade.