Benemax

Yup, it’s official. The American people have just received a collective lump of coal in their stockings. The U.S. Senate has passed the $870,000,000,000 Health Care Reform bill.

While the bill contains some positive features (e.g. insurance underwriting reform and expanded assistance for low income Americans), the legislation is loaded with provisions that will drive up the cost and drive down the quality of health care in the U.S. As much as we do need right minded reform, this bill will almost certainly do much more harm than good.

Chief among the disturbing aspects of this bill is a provision that would limit health benefit plans to 4 cookie cutter options (so called “Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze”). This feature would severely limit competition and undermine all the creative plan design efforts that have been the focus of employer groups and consultants over the past several years.

Also disturbing is the new tax on insurance companies, drug companies and medical device manufacturers; the cost of this provision will be directly passed through to customers in the form of higher premiums.

Finally, the bill severely cuts Medicare funding, threatens provider reimbursement levels and imposes all sorts of new bureaucratic regulations on the practice of medicine. At a time when 30 million new insureds are scheduled to be added to the insurance roles, Congress is determined to make the practice of medicine more difficult and therefore less attractive to “the best and the brightest” in our country.

You don’t need to be an expert to understand where this bill will take us. Newly insured Americans will increase the demand for services at the same time that new regulations and wage cuts will reduce the supply of those services. More demand + less supply = skyrocketting prices.

But the battle is far from over. The Senate bill needs to be reconciled with the House bill. There will be one more vote in both chambers, probably sometime in January, before this bill becomes law. A shift of just a handful of votes in either chamber would turn the tide.