With the most significant piece of legislation to pass in Congress in decades, the American health care system has been effectively revolutionized.
While the opposition bellyaches with wild predictions of the end of civilization and the immediate implementation of socialism, proponents of President Obama’s $2.5 trillion health care overhaul, which was passed by a slim margin in Congress, list the following benefits, according to Democrats:
1. Prohibits pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans.
2. Provides immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition through a temporary high-risk pool.
3. Prohibits dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all individual plans.
4. Lowers seniors prescription drug prices by beginning to close the donut hole.
5. Offers tax credits to small businesses to purchase coverage.
6. Eliminates lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits in all plans.
7. Requires plans to cover an enrollee’s dependent children until age 26.
8. Requires new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing.
9. Ensures consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal new insurance plan decisions.
10. Requires premium rebates to enrollees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and requires public disclosure of the percentage of premiums applied to overhead costs.
Obama is counting that, with the health care overhaul, the nation will be able to lower costs for everyone and give Americans and small businesses more control over their health care choices.
–terry shropshire
