Yesterday, before the President released his health care proposal (it can’t really be accurately characterized as a bill, since it leaves out so many details that CBO can’t score it) I wrote that it would “just be the same old command-and-control health care bill.”
I was wrong in that the new proposal is much, much more of a “command-and-control” health care bill, with the new proposal including another new government entity, the “Health Insurance Rate Authority,” that would scrutinize how insurance companies set their prices and ultimately impose price controls on insurance products.
Jennifer Rubin has a good summary over on Commentary:
What we do know is that under ObamaCare’s latest incarnation, you really don’t get to keep your existing health-care plan. And we know that it seeks to federalize the regulation of the health-insurance industry. (“The big new idea in the president’s plan is to federalize regulation of health insurance, creating a Health Insurance Rate Authority to conduct ‘reviews of unreasonable rate increases and other unfair practices of insurance plans.’ This reflects the overall strategy to give more and more control over the health sector to Washington.”) And it seems that there are $136B worth of new taxes to be imposed on the people Obama said he’d never tax, namely those families making less than $250,000.
So more taxes, more regulation, more spending, bigger deficits… this is supposed to provide new momentum for health care reform?