Dems mount most aggressive fight yet to protect healthcare reform law

[cal04]

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/141091-dems-mount-most-vigorous-counteroffensive-to-date-to-protect-healthcare-reform

The White House and congressional Democrats are vowing to aggressively fight back against any efforts to dismantle their signature healthcare reform law despite a State of the Union promise to work with Republicans on improvements.

(snip)
Now Democrats are mounting their most vigorous counter-offensive to date by highlighting the law’s benefits for Americans and painting repeal proponents as stooges of the insurance industry.

(snip)
Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack said healthcare advocates “really welcome” a debate on repeal, because they say three things have changed since the law was enacted last year: Advocates are now better prepared to explain it; all the groups who supported the law for different reasons are now “working together in collaboration, with cohesive messages to protect the legislation”; and provisions are now in place that people are benefiting from.

(snip)
“Obviously, a part of our strategy will have to be to react and respond to what the aggressors will be doing,” Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), the top Democrat on the House oversight committee’s health subpanel, told The Hill. “But we will also keep focused on helping the American people really understand what it is they’ve got.”

[NuclearDem]

1. I'm willing to give up a lot...

but not HCR. I got coverage that's paying for my much-needed therapy thanks to that. Therapy that's keeping me from going back to prison.

[loudsue]

2. The teapartiers are trying to get rid of the part where people are FORCED to buy

insurance, or they face a fine. I'm with them on that part of the reform. It was something that never should have been a part of the health care bill. Most republicans aren't trying to derail the entire health care bill. Most are just trying to get rid of the bad parts.

The rest, of course, are just trying to fuck things up.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

3. The repubs want to gut the whole thing

and nobody has a viable mechanism so far for replacing the mandate- without which the whole thing basically collapses. I'm open to ideas for improving the law but those won't come from the Repubs and they don't have people's best interests at heart on this IMHO.

[eomer]

4. Change it to a tax on everyone and a tax credit for those who purchase insurance.

Use the tax revenues from those who don't purchase insurance to defray the costs of providing care to the uninsured and, in particular, to those who can't afford to buy insurance.

Of course you can't get this or any other worthwhile legislation through the Republican majority in the House, so the unfortunate situation is that the best we can get, for now, is what we've already got.

Taking the mandate out would require also taking out the ban on the pre-existing condition exclusion and at that point you don't have much left.

If you tried to take the mandate out but leave in the ban on the pre-existing condition exclusion then you have a system that cannot work. People would be smart enough to not buy insurance while they are healthy and wait until they have a major illness to buy it. So then the cost of the insurance would be impossibly high because it is no longer really insurance. The concept of insurance is that people pay their share of the costs during a time when they are exposed to the risk but have not yet experienced the loss. In other words, you can't require insurance companies to sell fire insurance to someone whose house has already burned down. Such a system would be nonsensical and would never work.