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Monday, August 31, 2009
Boomer with Attitude / News GOP bill gets private Charlotte hearing
Posted By John Grooms on Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 5:39 PM
Sept. 1, Sen. Richard Burr is hosting a big meeting on health care in Charlotte, and you’re not invited. Unless you’re a Carolinas Medical Center employee or one of the elite “special guests,” you won’t get to hear Burr, along with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. John McCain, talk about the GOP’s proposal for health care reform, aka the “Snowball’s Chance In Hell Bill” — OK, it’s actually the Patients Choice Act.
Why McCain? Because the GOP bill is based on McCain’s health care proposal during the 2008 presidential campaign. Why McConnell? He needed to get out of town after losing the Men Who Look Like Turtles competition in his home state of Kentucky.
The Patients Choice Act allows employees to keep the same insurance when they change jobs. Trouble is, it also does away with employer subsidies for providing health care, so under this plan, you can probably forget about getting health insurance through work anymore. The bill also offers up to $5,700 per family to buy health insurance, which sounds good until you realize that health insurance rose to $12,680 annually for family coverage in 2008, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Besides those problems, the GOP bill would still leave over 30 million of Americans uninsured, and does nothing to lower health care spending.
The meeting starts at 9 a.m. tomorrow at Carolinas Medical Center.
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