The Lieberman senate health care bill is not reform.  It does not provide competition to profit-driven insurance companies.  And the American people lose.  So progressives and liberals should put this dog down, and now.

Sure, it prohibits exclusion for pre-existing conditions and keeps insurers from dropping people when they get sick.  But frankly, that's not reform.  It is what should have been the case all along.  And, in fact, Congress has already addressed this issue with regard to group plans (e.g., plans that your employer buys to cover all employees), but failed to completely solve the problem.

In 1996, Congress passed a law known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA (also known as the Kassebaum-Kennedy Act), which went into effect on July 1, 1997. HIPAA was designed to allow employees to move freely from one job to another without the risk of becoming uninsured for their most serious health problems. HIPAA also has protections for individuals who move from group plans to an individual health plan.

Under HIPPA, when you are otherwise eligible for health care services under an employee benefit plan, you cannot be completely excluded from the plan (except in the case you enrolled after the enrollment deadline) on the basis of any of the following:

If you are under a federally-regulated health plan, twelve months is the longest period of time that your plan can exclude coverage for your preexisting condition.  Some states -- such as California -- have even stricter limits.

So the Lieberman senate bill merely extends what has already been implemented.  It does not do anything truly new, except for one thing:

PEOPLE WILL BE MANDATED TO BUY INSURANCE PRODUCTS OR FACE A DAUNTING FINE.

There is no competition for the profit-driven health insurance corporations.

There is no limit on the ability to deny coverage for "organizational purposes."  An example of that is defining a particular type of policy into which a company funnels certain groups of applicants.  Even though coverage will supposedly be mandated, the company will not be prohibited from simply deciding that it will limit coverage in certain poliy lines, or even cancel those lines, completely!

And that's just the beginning of the shennanigans that will go on under the Lieberman bill that mandates we all pay insurance companies and provides no caps on premiums, no competition for the profit corporations, no mandated coverage, and no enforcement mechanism to ensure that sick people are actually treated fairly and equally.

The Lieberman bill has a pernicious and invasive cancer.  And so, since the Senate seems unable to cure the sickness, it is time for liberals and progressives to do the humane thing and euthanize this bill.  Kill it, for all our sakes.  Better no bill than a bill mandating purchase of insurance with no true reforms in place.

Congress can mandate coverage for pre-existing conditions and can keep insurers from dropping sick people by amending HIPPA.  We don't need a phony "reform" bill that makes only insurance companies healthy.