Obama’s Pre-Summit Proposal Is Healthcare We Could Use

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog 

Now here's the kind of healthcare reform we could use! Oh, I know it increases the government bureaucracy, but finally President Obama is proposing a version of healthcare reform that everyone, save insurance company executives, will appreciate. CNN reports:

The Obama administration will propose legislation that would allow the government to block excessive rate hikes by health insurance companies.

This is part of the administration's attempt to smooth out differences between the two versions of healthcare reform passed by the House and the Senate. Parts of his proposal are good and parts are bad. But he's trying to find middle ground in legislation filled with more land mines than DMZs, and this particular piece of reform is a good place to start.

I do not support anything that will raise the already scary-huge federal deficit, and that includes subsidies to cover people who do not have insurance. The federal government should, instead, require the insurance companies to offer what used to be referred to as major medical policies to them: policies that don't cover office visits but do cover hospital stays for major disease or catastrophic accidents.

Obama reform should also include an end to so-called pre-existing conditions, the practice by which insurance companies refuse to cover a disease you've already had or a condition that may recur. 

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