Labor & Employment Law

Facts About Health Care Reform

By Mike Hall

Yesterday, we found out that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to spend $50 million in this fall’s election to (take your pick): 1. attack; 2. bend the truth; or 3. down right lie about the new health care reform law that President Obama put the finishing touches on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal describes the Chamber’s efforts as “an aggressive strategy to blunt the impact of the new law.”

BTW, Christina Bellantoni on TPM yesterday noted:

The new push for the 2010 midterm elections adds to a more than $144 million ad campaign the Chamber mounted on behalf of its business membership in the last year against passage of the measure.

Before you’re innundated with ads claiming health care reform will destroy the economy, the nation and world as we know it, here are a few of health care reform’s many benefits for working families. (Check out the video of Washington State working families celebrating the new law.)

Two important facts, first: If you have employer-sponsored health care coverage won at the bargaining table, you’ll keep it. Second, the tax on health care benefits in high-cost plans has been reduced by 85 percent and delayed until 2018. In addition, the new law:

• Ends insurance companies’ most abusive practices, including denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, beginning in 2014 for adults, and this September for children. The insurance industry already tried to weasel out of covering sick kids, but that sleazy maneuver came to a quick end.
• Eliminates annual and lifetime limits on benefits and ends discriminatory premiums for women and requires government review of excessive rate increases.
• Lowers health care costs for working families by creating new health insurance exchanges to increase competition and provides tax credits and cost-sharing assistance for middle- and lower-income families to purchase insurance.
• Helps seniors purchase prescription drugs, closes the Medicare prescription drug “donut hole” and ensures seniors get free preventive care under Medicare.

Click here for more information on the new health care reform and check back next week when we take a look at some health care reform facts vs. fiction.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on March 31, 2010 (boomark / email).