The Zong

Awhile back, I wrote about the Bush Administration’s desire to fuck over sick kids rather than raise taxes or stop using our money to destroy countries. Well, the situation is much more visible today, as congress works to pass Medicare legislation which includes an expansion of children’s health care that (surprise!) President Bush opposes.

President Bush has threatened to veto what he sees as a huge expansion of the children’s health care program, though some Republican senators have deserted him on the issue. The House measure calls for changes that the administration probably will find even more distasteful, including cuts in subsidies paid to private health plans serving Medicare beneficiaries.

Like the bill approved with a 17-4 vote last week in the Senate Finance Committee, the House bill would increase tobacco taxes to help finance expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Yep, that’s right. Not only does the bill increase cigarette taxes and give more money to insure uninsured children, it cuts payments to private insurance companies from Medicare. Sounds fucking awesome, right?

Rep. Charles Rangel, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the House bill would “reverse the Republican drive to privatize Medicare,” by reducing payments to private health plans that care for 8 million of the 43 million Medicare beneficiaries.

The private plans, offered by companies such as UnitedHealth and Humana, say they provide more benefits than traditional Medicare.

But the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the government paid the private plans, on average, 12 percent more than it would cost to care for the same people in traditional Medicare. Moreover, it said, payments to the fastest-growing kind of plan - known as private fee-for-service plans - are 19 percent higher than the cost of traditional Medicare.

So, it would seem, that the only people supporting this bill are private insurance companies, their lobbyists, and the President of the United States, who sleeps soundly in the knowledge that his children have never been without health insurance in their lives, and that his ass is completely free of cancer.

- M.G.