Uh Oh. Trouble In Healthcare Paradise?

According to this, insurance companies are fed up with Obama’s healthcare nonsense, and are getting noisy about it. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study released today showed that the current legislation will add thousands of dollars to the costs that people who are currently insured will pay for healthcare insurance. Why? Because the legislation doesn’t allow insurers to deny coverage to those people who opt not to pay premiums until they become sick. So what happens is, aaaaall the people who pay premiums responsibly, all year round, get stuck with higher bills to cover the jokers who only pick it up in times of trouble.

Naturally, Democrats RUSHED to criticize PWC’s report. “Distorted and flawed!” said White House spokeswoman Linda Douglass. “Fundamentally dishonest!” said AARP’s senior policy strategist, John Rother. “A hatchet job!” said a spokesman for Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.

I think I speak for an awful lot of people when I say, “Waaaaaaah!”

PWC’s report projects that the current legislation would add $1700 annually to a typical family plan. It would add $600 for a single person. And in ten years those figures would climb to $4000 more for family coverage and $1500 more for single coverage.

Plus, the Baucus bill would still only cover 94% of Americans (versus the 83% now). I don’t know about you guys, but it seems kinda dumb to spend nearly a trillion dollars to increase the percentage of people covered by 11%. Particularly when the CBO can’t yet confirm that this would truly be deficit neutral until the bill specifics come out.

I still think all the bills floating around Congress right now need to be completely scrapped, and they need to just concentrate on other stuff for awhile, like Iran and North Korea and Afghanistan, before they go back to the drawing table on the healthcare stuff.