The Republicans in Congress knew from the start that their campaign to “repeal and replace” the health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act. was going nowhere. Sure enough, on February 1, the Senate rejected the repeal bill on a 47-51 party-line vote.
The law is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a determination of its constitutionality.
Meanwhile, amid all the fol-de-rol about repeal, the insurance industry is implementing a 50-state strategy to eviscerate the law. Health insurance whistleblower Wendell Potter explained it:
“The rhetoric of repeal is just a smoke screen to obscure the real objective of the ‘repeal and replace’ caucus: to preserve the sections of the law that big insurance and its allies like and strip out the regulations and consumer protections they don’t like.”
The industry is quite happy with the law’s mandate that everyone purchase health insurance. That creates a captive market – and there’s no public option to provide the competition that would hold rates down. But they don’t like the ban on using pre-existing conditions to deny consumers coverage. And they squirm over the new requirement that they spend 80 to 85 percent of premium dollars on medical claims.
Insurance lobbyists will wage a state by state campaign to persuade regulators and insurance commissioners to water down the fine-print rules that govern the administration of the law.
Warning that the industry is organized to deploy platoons of slick lobbyists to turn the Affordable Care Act into an insurance industry protection law, The Nation magazine called for “a movement to counter the insurance lobby with a people’s fifty-state strategy for meaningful health care reform.” At the heart of the movement should be the demand for a public option as a check on insurance industry thievery.
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