GOP Health Care Proposal Reviews

So the Republicans have, after months of promising to do so, released their proposed health care reform. A few reviews:

HCAN: The GOP Health Care Bill: Insurers Win, You Lose.

The Republican bill runs the table on provisions that will increase insurance company profits.

Make more money by denying care? Check.

Make more money by ending insurance policies when someone gets sick and actually needs to use the care they paid for? Check. (At least according to the original version of the Wall Street Journal article.)

Allowing insurers to move to the least-regulated states and sell their junk insurance to the rest of the country? Check.

There’s no attempt to expand coverage to people who are dying without it, that would be too costly. And no attempt to shield people from insurance company abuses like denial of care.

As Jonathan Singer points out, though, there is one very courageous stance in the Republicans’ health care bill: there are no prohibitions against pre-existing condition rejections. That’s despite the fact that 82% of people favor prohibiting insurance companies from denying care for pre-existing conditions. So it’s a horrible policy, but you can’t say they’re just pandering (to anyone but insurance companies, anyway).

The biggest ouch comes courtesy of Ezra Klein. Saying that “Republicans want to make the insurance industry more like the credit card industry, he goes on:

I’m tired of doing this. I’m tired of pretending that political documents are the same as policy documents. Republicans have not released a plan to reform the health-care system. They have released a plan to have people stop bugging them about releasing a plan to reform the health-care system. The two are not the same thing.

So…that sounds good.