Health Care Blog

Will the Republicans Post Their Health Plan… and When?

The President believes strongly that Thursday’s bipartisan meeting on health insurance reform will be most productive if both sides come to the table with a unified plan to start discussion – and if the public has the opportunity to inspect those proposals up close before the meeting happens.

That’s why yesterday the White House posted online the President’s proposal for bridging the differences between the Senate- and House-passed health insurance reform bills. The proposal puts American families and small business owners in control of their own health care. It makes insurance more affordable by providing the largest middle-class tax cuts for health care in history, it ends discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, holds insurance companies accountable,   and reduces our deficit by $100 billion over the next 10 years.

But you don’t have to take our word for it: the proposal is posted right here at WhiteHouse.gov for everyone to examine. You can read through the plan’s bipartisan ideas section by section, or you can select your health care status and find out what the proposal would mean for you. You can even submit a question for our policy staff to answer.

What you can’t do just yet is read about the Republicans’ consensus plan – because so far they haven’t announced what proposal they’ll be bringing to the table. To be sure, there are many Republicans who share the President’s conviction that we need to act on reform, and there are several pieces of Republican health care legislation out there. Previously we were told this was the House Republican bill. Is it still? We look forward to hearing whether this the proposal they'll bring. The Senate Republicans have yet to post any kind of plan, so we continue to await word from them. As of right now, the American people still don’t know which one Congressional Republicans support and which one they want to present to the public on Thursday.

President Obama has been clear that his proposal isn’t the final say on legislation, and that’s what Thursday’s meeting is all about. But after a year of historic national dialogue about reform, it’s time for both sides to be clear about what their plan is to lower costs, hold insurance companies accountable, make health insurance affordable for those without it, and reduce the deficit.  A collection of piecemeal and sometimes conflicting ideas won’t do.

As we said today, we’ll be happy to post the Republican plan on our website once they indicate to us which one we should post. We hope they won’t pass up this opportunity to make their case to the American people.

Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director

“Health-Care Shocker” Shows Nobody is Immune from Insurance Company Abuses

While almost everybody has heard health insurance horror stories from stories in the local paper, from somebody they know, or even somebody closer to home, it’s easy to think it won’t happen to us personally. In many cases we never even see the worst of insurance company abuses until we get sick ourselves. But the rash of “jaw-dropping” premium increases, as the President put it in his Weekly Address earlier today, has shown that nobody is immune to bad practices from insurance companies as long as health reform is not in place.

As a recent report out of HHS documented, outrageous premium requests have hit every region of the country recently – up to 39% from one insurance company in California, 56% from another in Michigan, 24% in Connecticut, and 23% in Maine to name a few examples.

Yesterday we learned that our seniors are vulnerable as well. Seniors who remained enrolled in their Medicare Advantage plans – which are tied to private insurance -- experienced rapidly increasing premiums, at 32 percent on average, between 2009 and 2010.

And today we learn that younger Americans can be just as vulnerable – indeed one California mother found that premiums for her kids were rising at a rate that makes even the other outrageous examples look modest. In what a MarketWatch headline calls a “health-care shocker”:

[Lori] Creasey, a Huntington Beach, Calif.-based attorney, said she received notices late last year for the two individual Anthem policies she bought for her college-age sons. For her 18-year-old son, Kyle, the monthly premium was climbing to $135 from $80, a 69% hike. Her 21-year-old, Walter, saw his premium jump to $139 from $84, a 65% increase.

"I was kind of shocked when I got [them]," Creasey said.

Lori and her sons aren't the only Americans who have been shocked by their premium increases. And if we do nothing theirstories will become more and more common.

That's why the President is committed to passing health reform and it's why he has invited leaders from both parties in Congress to discuss the issue on Thursday. You can watch the meeting live here on our website.

We're closer than ever to passing real health reform and stories like this show us how important it is to finish the job.

Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director