Chairman Waxman recently addressed a forum sponsored by the Atlantic magazine where he predicted there would need to be additional health care reforms down the road.
Jennifer Lubell at Modern Healthcare reports:
“Lawmakers will be watching to see how the new reform law unfolds, if the health insurance exchanges are covering more people and if the country moves away from employer-based coverage. The new statute ‘could be modified in the future after we know how it works,’ Waxman said.”
After we know how it works? First, it was necessary to pass the bill to find out what was in it. Now Mr. Waxman concedes that this legislation was an unpredictable gamble with Americans’ health care coverage.
It sounds as if the goal all along was to discourage employers from continuing coverage of employees, which flies in the face of President Obama’s oft-made claim that if a person is satisfied with his or her current insurance plan, they can keep it.
Well, it appears Mr. Waxman’s grand plan is beginning to bear fruit.
Shawn Tully at CNN reported last week that a review of internal documents of some of the largest companies in the country reveal that executives are seriously considering the termination of health coverage for their employees and opt to pay government penalties instead.
It would have been nice had the Congressional Democrats shared this grand plan with the rest of us prior to passing the health care law.
On a somewhat related note, Mr. Waxman was forced to cancel the Committee hearings he had planned for purposes of excoriating company executives after their financial assessment of the health law’s elimination of the tax break for retiree drug benefits. The Democratic staff of the Energy & Commerce committee concluded, “The companies acted properly and in accordance with accounting standards in submitting filings to the S.E.C. in March and April.”
Congratulations, Chairman Waxman.
