Statehouse GOP ready with health insurance bill
January 23, 2007 at 1:42 pm by Web Editor in NewsThey outsourced the war. They tried to wreck social security.
They’ve been sued by states that bound together in response to the EPA’s failure to enforce environmental laws.
They continue to talk about "making the tax cuts permanent" even as America runs up a colossal budget deficit.
Now the Republicans want to sell you a health insurance plan.
From President George W. Bush in his radio address on Saturday to lobbyists such as Newt Gingrich to Sen. Judson Hill, R-Marietta, and other GOP state legislators, the right wing would like to break up group health insurance as we know it and supplant it with individual, "consumer-driven" health coverage.
Health insurance is already laid up in a body cast in this country.
These guys want to make it worse.
You hear about former Gov. Mitt Romney up in Massachusetts achieving "health insurance for all," and the Governator-with-a-heart-after-all trying to follow Mitt’s lead out in California, and it sounds great. The trouble is that all these anti-big government Republicans with bronze doorknob busts of Reagan in their offices want to order you to buy health insurance so you can go buy it from their friends.
In the Peach State, Hill’s bill, the "Insuring Georgia’s Families Act," or Senate Bill 28, which he filed earlier this month, proposes exemptions from premium taxes for businesses that offer high-deductible, individual insurance plans to their employees.
It also seeks to break up group health insurance for state employees by directing the Board of Community Health to establish alternative health insurance plans for state employees.
It’s a legislative offering straight out of the playbook of Gingrich and his Center for Health Transformation, which receives financial backing from the drug and insurance industry.
The debate could turn into one of the more significant battles this session.
They say Georgia is five years behind the country. If so, it’s going to be a long war ahead here for those who want to expand, not abolish, the concept of group health insurance.
In the meantime, it’s going to be every man for himself, or at least a lot of individual health insurance policy options — out there in no man’s land.
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