Grassley's Bipartisanship

The Ranking Member of the of Senate Finance Committee released a report today claiming that bipartisan efforts to forge a compromise on healthcare have begun to fall apart. Here's an exert of the memorandum.

"In addition to concerns about costs to taxpayers and affordability for individuals, there are still some serious outstanding issues that have yet to be resolved like preventing taxpayer funding of abortion services and the enforcement against subsidies for illegal aliens."

If you ask me the first line here is a contradiction. Grassley wants the bill to be cheap, but he also wants affordable healthcare. The way to provide affordable care for Americans though is to require citizens to purchase insurance, an idea Grassley has been fighting against. Instead Grassley wants a reinsurance program, which would be a voluntary system. If we want to bring tax payer costs down it only makes sense to require citizens to be insured and for those who are not, we can make them pay into the system through tax penalties.(around 3,800 for a family of 4)

I also want to touch on the issue of illegal aliens. Ezra talked about this earlier in the week, most immigrants come to America when they are young, therefore they tend to be healthy. On a large scale, insurance must cover all the people under its plan, so if insurance companies were able to add an influx of cheap healthy workers, individual premiums would be lower across the board. The other thing to consider is that if a mandate passes requiring companies to offer benefits to citizens, but not illegals, blue collar Americans could suffer in the job market. Then again it could be Grassley's intention to keep labor cheap for American corporations, while the tax payers continue to pay for immagrants expensive ER care. I don't have much hope for illegal coverage in this bill, but future congress's should look into it.

To be quite honest I'm sick of the Finance Committee we heard last week that they would vote this week and now that's been delayed again. This bill will be molded in conference, the leadership just needs to push it through the gang of six. If you ask me throw Senator Snowe a bone, get her vote and we can move on to conference and maybe not worry about the filibuster.

TLH