Whole Reason

In 5 free­doms you’d lose in health care reform, For­tune edi­tor Shawn Tully con­tributes his opin­ion to the ongo­ing spe­cial report on Health­care at CNN.  The sub­ti­tle says it all: 

If you read the fine print in the Con­gres­sional plans, you’ll find that a lot of cher­ished aspects of the cur­rent sys­tem would disappear.

Here’s a no-brainer:

Page by page, the bills reveal a web of restric­tions, fines, and
man­dates that would rad­i­cally change your health-care coverage.

I am so glad that some­one with the vis­i­bil­ity of For­tune is smelling the cof­fee before it is too late. 

Here’s his five things you will lose if the cur­rent leg­is­la­tion passes:

1. Free­dom to choose what’s in your plan

   Today, many states require these “stan­dard ben­e­fits pack­ages” — and
   they’re a major cause for the rise in health-care costs. Every group,
   from chi­ro­prac­tors to alcohol-abuse coun­selors, do lob­by­ing to get
   included. Con­necti­cut, for exam­ple, requires reim­burse­ment for hair
   trans­plants, hear­ing aids, and in vitro fertilization.

2. Free­dom to be rewarded for healthy liv­ing, or pay your real costs

   But the bills would bar reward­ing peo­ple who pur­sue a healthy lifestyle
   of exer­cise or a cholesterol-conscious diet. That’s hardly a for­mula
   for lower costs.

3. Free­dom to choose high-deductible coverage

   The bills seri­ously endan­ger the trend toward consumer-driven care in
   gen­eral. By requir­ing min­i­mum pack­ages, they would pre­vent patients
   from choos­ing stripped-down plans that cover only major med­ical
   expenses.

4. Free­dom to keep your exist­ing plan

   The employ­ees who got their cov­er­age before the law goes into effect
   can keep their plans, but once again, there’s a catch. If the plan
   changes in any way — by alter­ing co-pays, deductibles, or even
   switch­ing cov­er­age for this or that drug — the employee must drop out
   and shop through the exchange. Since these plans gen­er­ally change their
   poli­cies every year, it’s likely that mil­lions of employ­ees will lose
   their plans in 12 months.

5. Free­dom to choose your doctors

   Under the pro­pos­als, the gate­keep­ers would the­o­ret­i­cally guide patients
   to tests and treat­ments that have proved most cost-effective. The
   dan­ger is that doc­tors will be finan­cially rewarded for deny­ing care,
   as were HMO physi­cians more than a decade ago. It was con­sumer out­rage
   over despotic gate­keep­ers that made the HMOs so unpop­u­lar, and killed
   what was billed as the solu­tion to America’s health-care cost explosion.