New Wyden health care proposal could be crucial
by snaxattack
Daily Kos
July 16, 2009
I mentioned in a previous diary the importance of the insurance exchange as a tool for enacting real health care reform. Without access to the health insurance exchange, there is no access to the public option and no access to portable health insurance. The House and Senate approaches both restrict access to the insurance exchange through a process called "firewalling", forcing everyone who has employer-based health insurance to keep that insurance. Firewalling is an impediment to real reform and must be stopped!
Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein are now reporting that Ron Wyden has come out with a "Free Choice Proposal" that would not only eliminate firewalls; it would force employers to contribute to the cost of health care on the insurance exchange. Wyden, who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, seems to have drawn major ideas from his Healthy Americans Act in order to achieve a happy medium that balances letting people keep what they have with reorganizing the health care system.
The Senate committees are making it hard to even enter the exchange as an individual. In order to prevent insurance companies from seeing real competition and make it more difficult to receive government subsidies, they are creating a "firewall" that puts a barrier between the insurance exchange and employees of companies that offer their own group insurance plan.
We need to start lobbying our congressional representatives for a STRONG insurance exchange, with no firewall to prevent employees of large companies from accessing high quality, portable insurance through the insurance exchange. We need to ask our congresspeople to implement a plan that allows large employers to contract with the insurance exchange, just as small businesses will be able to do.
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