Already Holes In Health Care: Dems Scramble To Fix Gap In Kids' Benefits

It seems the Dems, Liberals and Progressives were so concerned about rushing to make history and ram through 9000-plus special interest projects that hours after President Obama signed the health care legislation, a potential problem emerged. Administration officials are now scrambling to fix a gap in highly touted benefits for children.

Obama made better coverage for children a centerpiece of his health care remake, but it turns out the letter of the law provided a less-than-complete guarantee that kids with health problems would not be shut out of coverage.

Under the new law, insurance companies still would be able to refuse new coverage to children because of a pre-existing medical problem, said Karen Lightfoot, spokeswoman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the main congressional panels that wrote the bill Obama signed into law Tuesday.

However, if a child is accepted for coverage, or is already covered, the insurer cannot exclude payment for treating a particular illness, as sometimes happens now. For example, if a child has asthma, the insurance company cannot write a policy that excludes that condition from coverage. The new safeguard will be in place later this year.

Full protection for children would not come until 2014, said Kate Cyrul, a spokeswoman for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, another panel that authored the legislation. That's the same year when insurance companies could no longer deny coverage to any person on account of health problems.

Obama's public statements have conveyed the impression that the new protections for kids were more sweeping and straightforward.

"This is a patient's bill of rights on steroids," the president said Friday at George Mason University in Virginia. "Starting this year, thousands of uninsured Americans with pre-existing conditions will be able to purchase health insurance, some for the very first time. Starting this year, insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions."

And Saturday, addressing House Democrats as they approached a make-or-break vote on the bill, Obama said, "This year ... parents who are worried about getting coverage for their children with pre-existing conditions now are assured that insurance companies have to give them coverage -- this year."

Late Tuesday, the administration said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would try to resolve the situation by issuing new regulations. The Obama administration interprets the law to mean that kids can't be denied coverage, as the president has said repeatedly.

"To ensure that there is no ambiguity on this point, the secretary of HHS is preparing to issue regulations next month making it clear that the term 'pre-existing exclusion' applies to both a child's access to a plan and his or her benefits once he or she is in the plan for all plans newly sold in this country six months from today," HHS spokesman Nick Papas said.

The coverage problem could mainly affect parents who purchase their own coverage for the family, as many self-employed people have to do. Families covered through employer plans typically do not have to worry about being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

Parents whose kids are turned down by an insurer would still have a fallback under the law, even without Sebelius' fix. They could seek coverage through state high-risk insurance pools slated for a major infusion of federal funds.

The high-risk pools are intended to serve as a backstop until 2014, when insurers no longer would be able to deny coverage to those in frail health. That same year, new insurance markets would open for business, and the government would begin to provide tax credits to help millions of Americans pay premiums.

An insurance industry group says the language in the law that pertains to consumer protections for kids is difficult to parse.

"We're taking a closer look at it to see what exactly the requirement will be," said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the main industry lobby.

To date, 360 Degrees has accounted for 237 gaps, loopholes and ambiguous rules and regulations. Already, the reform might need reforming and the overhaul requires additional overhauling.

Reuters; AP; FOX News, 360.

Health Care Bill Update - Dems: Health Bill To Cost $940B Over 10 Years

House Democrats are on track for a Sunday vote on sweeping health care legislation that will expand coverage to millions of uninsured while also reducing the federal deficit, leaders said this morning.

The health care bill delivers on President Obama's top domestic priority by providing coverage to more than 30 million people now uninsured at a 10-year cost of $940 billion. It does so through a combination of tax credits for middle class households and an expansion of the Medicaid program for low income people.

The No. 2 Democrat in the House said the health care package would also reduce the federal deficit by more than $100 billion over its first 10 years -- and more than $1 trillion in the second decade.No elaborations were made.

The big expansion of coverage would not come until 2014, when new health insurance marketplaces open for business.

In the meantime, the legislation calls for a series of new consumer benefits. Insurers could not deny coverage to children because of an pre-existing health problem, nor could they place lifetime dollar caps on the amount of coverage. A new high-risk health insurance pool would provide coverage to uninsured people who can't get private coverage because of health problems.

Once the legislation is fully phased in, most Americans would be required to carry coverage -- and insurers would be forbidden from turning down people with health problems, or from charging them more.

Democrats are following a complicated two-track legislative strategy for passing the bill. First, the House will have to approve a Senate bill that many of its Democratic members object to. Then both chambers will quickly pass a package of fixes agreed to in negotiations with the White House.

Since the House will vote first, Hoyer said lawmakers are seeking assurances from their Senate counterparts that they have enough votes to pass the follow-up measure as well.

Reuters; Wall Street Journal; AP.

Lawmakers Struggle To Finish Health Bill

Pushing toward a history-making vote, Democrats will struggle to eliminate lingering complications standing in the way of House action this weekend on President Obama's landmark health care overhaul.

The Democrat's drive to make the nation's health care system "more efficient and extend coverage" to millions of uninsured Americans took on a growing sense of urgency, picking up endorsements from a longtime liberal holdout and from a retired Roman Catholic bishop and nuns who broke with church leaders over the bill's abortion provisions.

360 Degrees will have an upcoming In-Depth report in the next few days on this inside story. It would appear even the Catholic Church itself has its share of radical Progressives posing as church faithful - especially within its hierarchy.

Last-minute snags related to costs delayed formal release of the legislation and an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office at least until today. Democratic lawmakers had hoped to see those details last week.

Since Democrats are promising 72 hours for lawmakers and the public to review the legislation once it's released, that would push a House vote on the bill until Sunday at the earliest -- the same day Obama plans to leave for an overseas trip. Obama already has delayed the trip once so he can be present for the vote and help with the 11th-hour arm-twisting that inevitably will precede it.

Obama expressed optimism in an interview with Fox News Channel. "I'm confident it will pass," he said. "And the reason I'm confident that it's going to pass is because it's the right thing to do."

Democrats are seeking to make sure the legislation would reduce federal deficits annually over the next decade and are revisiting details of a planned tax on high-cost insurance plans that's been a sticking point for organized labor. Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, met with Obama at the White House on Wednesday, and officials said the labor leader raised concerns. Obama has proposed significantly softening the tax in keeping with an earlier deal with organized labor, and labor leaders want to preserve that accord, at a minimum.

The long-anticipated measure is actually the second of two bills that Obama hopes lawmakers will send him in coming days, more than a year after he urged Congress to remake the U.S. health care system. The first cleared the Senate late last year but went no further because House Democrats demanded significant changes - the very types of revisions now being packaged into the second bill.

Together, the measures are designed to extend coverage to more than 30 million who now lack it and prohibit insurance industry practices such as denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions. Obama also has asked lawmakers to slow the growth of medical spending generally, a far more difficult goal to achieve. The total cost is around $1 trillion over 10 years.

After heavy lobbying from Obama, liberal Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, announced his support Wednesday, becoming the first Democrat to declare he would vote in favor of the legislation after opposing an earlier version. Shortly after Kucinich's announcement, a letter was released from 60 leaders of religious orders urging lawmakers to vote for the legislation.

The endorsement reflected a division within the Catholic Church. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the Senate-passed legislation, contending it would permit the use of federal funds for elective abortions.

Late Wednesday, however, retired Bishop John E. McCarthy of Austin, Texas, said he was urging approval of the legislation. Reflecting growing opposition among states to the health care bill, Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter, a Republican, signed a measure Wednesday requiring the state attorney general to sue the federal government if residents are forced to buy health insurance. Similar legislation is pending in 37 other states.

FOX News; Reuters; CNS.

Obama Delays Asia Trip To Deal With Health Care - Not That It Really Matters

President Obama is postponing his long-scheduled Asian trip for a few days to make a final push for passage of historic legislation reinventing the health care system. 

Obama's decision, revealed Friday morning by senior administration official, came amid assertions by leading Hill Democrats that they're resolving disputes over the measure that has been through a host of rewrites. At the same time, these Democrats said decisions remain on how to subsidize health insurance coverage. And they confirmed they're still hunting for sufficient votes to get it through. 

However, the Democrats are living in dreamland if they think passing health care is good politics, writes Kim Strassel. The bill isn't going to become any more popular than it is now with independent voters if it becomes law, and passing it is hardly going to energize a Democratic base that wanted a public option and views the current legislation as a cop-out, Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal. 

Some Democrats argue that passing the bill will "prove they can lead," but passing a bill that most voters hate isn't a great example of good governance, Strassel writes. Any way you look at it, the politics behind the bill are bad—so bad "that it lends credence to the belief that some in the White House and Congress are far more ideologically interested in establishing European-style health care than they are the public's will or their party's electoral success," she concludes. 

We agree - The bill from the get-go is bad politics for a nation of people who deserve better than another socialistic scam.  And the Dems are living up to their reputation of being socialist scam artists clothed as do-gooders.