Talks are underway between the Senate and the House to reconcile the two health bills. There are hopes it will be passed before the State of the Union address, but that appears unlikely, as the Congressional Budget Office still has to figure out what the Bill may cost the taxpayers. While the Health Reform Bill shows every sign of actually becoming law, there are still landmines that might blow up along the way; not the least of which are the strong feelings and opinions held by members of the House and Senate. It wasn’t easy getting the votes to pass the Bill.
Several areas of contention deal with whether the proposed insurance exchanges ought to be federal or state-based; whether the Senate’s tax on what’s been dubbed “Cadillac plans” should be struck down or perhaps changed to be based on the level of benefits and not the cost of the premiums.
Other concerns revolve around whether or not the subsidies mentioned in the Senate Bill are way too low to make health insurance affordable or not, and what to make of the wish to get rid of the existing anti-trust exemptions for health insurance companies. Two other explosive issues have taken a bit of a backseat, but it is expected they will come to the forefront soon; immigration issues and abortion.
The major difficulty with passing the Health Reform Bill into law is trying to blend or reconcile what the House wants in the Bill and what the Senate expects. For instance, the House feels it should tax the wealthy to finance reforms. This would apparently have the potential of generating $149 billion over 10 years to finance those reforms. Evidently there may yet be more adjustments made to the “Cadillac plan” that may include raising the cost threshold for what makes it a “special” plan and/or taking into consideration the value of a plan “benefit” rather than its cost.
The bottom line here is that there is no bottom line – yet. The clock is ticking as the nation awaits the implementation of health care reform; waiting to see if mandatory health insurance does come to pass or not, and whether everyone will really “have to have” health insurance.
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Bradley Palmer is with Grouphealthflorida.com offering Florida Group Health Insurance. To learn more about group health insurance, visit http://www.grouphealthflorida.com.
