Hildegarde

It’s Wednesday, which is a day I’ve been thinking would be without blog posts for a while.  I’ve got one of those scheduling conflicts that I look back on and wonder how I got myself into–I teach a night class that goes until nine on Tuesday, then a day class that meets at eight on Wednesday, and with the drive that means I go to be around midnight and get up at four and feel like I’m walking into walls.

But it occurs to me that a lot of the discussion of the health care bill is going past each other.  I’ve been making general statements about the national stats, while the concerns of a lot of you here are for individual cases.

It seems to me that JEM, for instance, is supporting the health care bill because she thinks it will result in her daughter getting health insurance coverage–she expects that if the bill passes, her daughter, who works part time, will have health insurance while she now has none.

I think that that won’t happen. 

Rather, I think that what will happen if this health care bill passes is this:

The advantage for hiring people part time will disappear–now, an employer can hire part time and not have to pay for health care coverage.  After the bill, he’ll have to pay for coverage whether the employee works part or full time.

The sensible thing for him to do, then, is not to hire any more part time employees, and to fire the ones he has in favor of hiring more full time employees.  In most part time arrangements, a single full time employee can do the work of at least two part time employees, and in many jobs the ratio is even higher.  So if I now have 10 full time and 90 part time employees, I fire 45 part time employees and make the other 45 full time, and I save the cost of insurance for 45 people. 

But the bad new may be even worse than that.

The prices for health insurance being quoted are very low.  You couldn’t insure a single healthy adult at $400 a month in CT, and the reason is not that CT is naturall more expensive in that way.

Rather, CT mandates lots of coverage that all insurance policies in the state must carry.  FL  does not mandate so much coverage, so health insurance is cheaper precisely because it covers fewer things.

But the present health care bill will mandate coverage in a whole list of areas that are not mandated by the state of FL at the moment–for diagnostic tests, for mental health services, for rehab–

That will drive the cost of insurance up.

And the bill requires insurance companies to cover people with previously existing conditions, which will also drive the cost of insurance up.

Some of the original versions of this bill had provisions which would be helpful–all those provisions are now gone.

The health insurance companies are exempt from antitrust laws–they still are, under this bill.

Their premium prices are entirely unregulated–they still are, under this bill.

Mandated coverage is actually increased, making premiums higher.

And there is no alternative to dealing with the insurance companies.  A public option would have meant that if I didn’t like the way Aetna or Blue Cross was treating me, I had someplace else to go. 

With this bill, I have nowhere.

If you think this bill will insure people who are not insured–by all means, support it.

I think it will render even more people uninsured, and lead to a significantly more people unemployed at the same time.

I don’t see why I should support something I am sure will only make things worse.

And now, I’m going to go support some caffeine.