What exactly will the Senate Health Reform do? Why should you support it? David Plouffe of Organizing for America provides this useful summary. The bill will:
- Extend coverage to 31 million Americans, the largest expansion of coverage since the creation of Medicare.
- Ensure that you can choose your own doctor.
- Finally stop insurance companies from denying coverage due to a pre-existing condition.
- Make sure you will never be charged exorbitant premiums on the basis of your age, health, or gender.
- Guarantee you will never lose your coverage just because you get sick or injured.
- Protect you from outrageous out-of-pocket expenditures by establishing lifetime and annual limits.
- Allow young people to stay on their parents' coverage until they're 26 years old.
- Create health insurance exchanges, or "one-stop shops" for individuals purchasing insurance, where insurance companies are forced to compete for new customers.
- Lower premiums for families, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office especially for struggling folks who will receive subsidies.
- Help small businesses provide health care coverage to their employees with tax credits and by allowing them to purchase coverage through the exchanges.
- Improve and strengthen Medicare by eliminating waste and fraud (without cutting basic benefits), beginning to close the Medicare Part D donut hole, and extending the life of the Medicare trust fund.
- Create jobs by reining in costs fostering competition, reducing waste and inefficiency, and starting to reward doctors and hospitals for quality, not quantity, of care.
- Cut the deficit by over $130 billion in the next 10 years.
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