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Howard Dean's "kill the bill" assault on the Senate health reform bill isn't justified, at least by his own standards a few months ago. The main attack Dean has volleyed against the current bill is that it lacks either a public option or a Medicare buy-in. That part is consistent with what he's said all year. But Tuesday night on MSNBC and yesterday morning on CNBC, Dean said the bill is not even "insurance [regulation] reform":
DEAN: It isn't health care reform. It's not even insurance reform. Take, for example, this -- there's a lot of talk about people who have preexisting conditions can get health insurance. Well, not exactly. The fine print in the Senate says about health care industry -- the health care industry gets to charge you three times as much if you're older than if you're younger.However, earlier this year, Dean praised the Senate Finance Committee (SFC) health reform bill for at least truly reforming insurance regulations:
DEAN: This [SFC] bill is going to cost us a lot of money and it isn’t going to do anything, if this so-called compromise is true. This compromise does nothing, except it will reform insurance. That’s a good thing to do.Here's the problem: The regulations in the current Senate reform bill are actually stronger than the SFC regulations Dean endorsed previously. The current reform bill has a medical loss ratio mandate of 85 percent -- and the SFC Dean praised had no requirement for how much of each premium dollar should go to health care, only reporting standards. In the current bill, parents can keep dependent children on their coverage longer, up to age 27. In the SFC bill, there was no such provision. The biggest kicker is community rating. In the quote from Tuesday night, Dean attacked the current bill for having a mere 3-to-1 age discrimination ratio. However, the SFC regulations which he praised earlier this year had a much weaker 4-to-1 ratio. The bill has been vastly improved in terms of regulations, but Dean still says the regulations are so terrible, "it's not even insurance reform." This argument to kill the bill simply rings hollow. --Lee Fang
