Nate Silver lays it all out in easy to read numbers.
Health Care Reform – Voters want it, Electeds want it to go away.
One thing I don’t understand is the equivalence, such as in this Roll Call article today, between the health care debate and the climate bill that was passed by the House a couple of weeks ago. There are 48 Congressional Districts that were won by John McCain and that currently have a Democratic Representative. Most of those districts are rural and blue-collar. On the climate change bill, this might give those Representatives ample reason to vote against the initiative: 38 of the 48 have per capita carbon output rates above the national median, and 36 of the 48 have an above-median concentration of jobs in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. But something the opposite holds true on health care.
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The bottom line is that the health care bill, among other things, is designed to help out the poor and the uninsured, and somehow or another will tax the rich in order to do so. I can understand if, say, Jason Altmire from PA-4 wants to vote against the health care bill. His district is suburban and pretty well off, and almost everyone there has health insurance. But Mike Ross of the Arkansas 4th, where almost 22 percent of the population is uninsured? This is a bill designed to help districts like his. And the same goes for most of the other Blue Dogs. A lot of the time, these guys are stuck in a tough spot between their party and their constituents. Here, those interests are mostly aligned. If a lot of the people on the top half of this list are voting against health care, first check the lobbying numbers, and then check to see if they’re still in office four years hence.
Read the rest HERE
I think the biggest sticking point has been the public option, and from everything I have seen health care reform will not work without it. That said i think that maybe the public option is being modeled in the wrong way. The public option should be used as a means to lift people into the private market. Things that could be done todo this such as
– Don’t allow employers to pick the public option as their plan
– a person should only be allowed to enter the public plan if
A. their monthly premium in the private market would exceed 15% of their monthly income after any subsidized portion of the premium is payed(individual below the poverty line)
B. their unemployed / can not work etc.
C. Their employer does not provide insurance and they can not buy insurance from the exchange for less then 15% of their monthly income after any subsidized portion is paid for.
– a person should be able to use any subsidized portion of payment towards a private plan ether on the exchange or with their employer.
– it would be a good idea to put time limits to public plan access in certain cases to encourage people to move into a private plan this could work similar to unemployment insurance.
Any tax’s collected to pay for all of this could slowly graduate down in cost as people are moved into the private health care system. along with several of the reasonable regulations already in most of the reform bills this i think would work nicely. This would make republicans less uneasy(maybe?) about the plan, and would definitely make it easier for the good ole blue dog’s to take on.