As I wrote earlier today, I agree More Needs To Be Done To Bring Systemic Change To Health Care. I also agree with Republican Susan Collins as reported in the NY Times:
Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican and pivotal centrist courted by the White House, delivered a blistering critique of the Senate bill on Monday, saying she could not support it because it would increase insurance costs for many middle-income families and small businesses.
“We should rewrite the whole bill,” Ms. Collins said. “There is considerable unease on both sides of the aisle about the impact of this bill, and as more analysis is done, I believe those concerns will only grow.”
Ms. Collins and the other Maine senator, Olympia J. Snowe, are among the few Republicans who had been considered potential supporters of the bill, drafted mainly by Senate Democrats with help from the White House.
Ms. Collins appeared to dash those hopes on Monday, even as she affirmed her belief that Democrats and Republicans could still find significant areas of agreement.
Summarizing her study of the bill over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Collins said it was “too timid” in revamping the health care system to reward high-quality care. She said the bill included “billions of dollars in new taxes and fees that will drive up the cost of health insurance premiums.”
And she noted that many of the taxes would take effect before the government started providing subsidies to low- and middle-income people to help them buy insurance.
Thus, Ms. Collins said, “there will be a gap for even low-income people where the effect of these fees will be passed on to consumers and increase premiums before any subsidies are available to offset those costs.”
The bill sets standards for the value of insurance policies, stipulating that they must cover at least 65 percent of medical costs, on average.
Most policies sold in the individual insurance market in Maine do not meet those standards, Ms. Collins said, so many insurers would have to raise premiums to comply with the requirements. As a result, she said, the premium for a 40-year-old buying the most popular individual insurance policy in Maine would more than double, to $455 a month.
The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, has tried to answer such criticism, saying that many of the current policies provided meager bare-bones coverage.
The Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, has drafted a health bill that he hopes to take to the Senate floor within weeks. He is waiting for a cost analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
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