The House health bill (H.R. 3962) creates a new minimum federal standard benefit package that will eventually apply to nearly all health plans, and establishes a new “Health Benefits Advisory Committee”. The Committee, housed within HHS, will make detailed recommendations, which the Secretary of HHS would then impose on all private insurers and employers through regulation.
HHS would have broad, permanent authority to continually update and expand the federal benefit requirements for all private health insurance and could regulate not only specific items and services than must be covered but also the minimum frequency or duration of a required covered service and the maximum allowable patient cost sharing.
All existing employment-based health insurance coverage would have to be modified or replaced to meet the new federal benefit package by 2018. Starting in 2013, all new individual or employment-based coverage would have to conform to the federal minimum benefit rules.
Limits age rating of premiums to no more than a two to one difference between highest and lowest. Thus, a 64 year old could not be charged more than twice the premium of an 18 year old. In contrast, there is about a five to one natural difference in the consumption of medical care between a 64 year old and an 18 year old. Thus, the effect will be to significantly increase the cost of health insurance for younger adults (those in their twenties and thirties).
So when Obama says repeatedly that "if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan" he's full of it. No Democrat plan allows for that and they all create these minimum federal standards that require a change or loss of your private health care plan. He knows. We know it. We need to continue to call him out on it. That he keeps repeating this falsehood is more proof that he believes the American people are stupid (not just the ones that voted for him, mind you, but all of us.)