Republican plans for your health care

Republicans have set as a top priority repealing Health Reform.  What they really want to do is to strip your health care coverage of key benefits and return to the bad old days when health insurance companies were in charge.  By repealing health reform the Republicans would: 

• Allow health insurance companies to deny you or a member of your family coverage because you or they have a pre-existing condition.
• Allow health insurance companies to cancel your health insurance coverage when you get sick.
• Allow health insurance companies to set arbitrary annual and lifetime limits on your coverage.
• Allow health insurance companies to require you to pay huge out of pocket sums if you or a member of your family develops a serious illness.
• Allow health insurance companies to discriminate based on gender.
• Allow health insurance companies to decide what doctors you can see and what treatment you can receive.
• Allow health insurance companies to refuse to renew your or a member of your family’s insurance because you or they got sick.
• Allow health insurance companies to raise premiums without having to justify the increases.
• Allow health insurance companies to create monopolies to avoid competing for business on the basis of cost and quality
• Remove protections in the existing law to protect Americans who lose their jobs, change jobs, move out of state, get divorced or get sick from losing their health insurance coverage.
• Allow members of Congress to have better options for purchasing health insurance coverage than most Americans.
• Eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits to working Americans to help them pay for health insurance.
• Eliminate the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
• Eliminate billions in tax credits to small businesses for offering insurance coverage to their employees.
• Allow health care expenditures to reach 21 percent of GDP—on fifth of our economic output—by 2019.
• Allow spending on Medicaid to reach 8 percent of GDP by 2019.
• Make it next to impossible for 19 percent of the non-elderly population, or 54 million Americans, to obtain affordable health insurance by 2019.
• Require families with health insurance to pay a hidden tax of $1,000 to cover the cost of uncompensated care by 2019.
• Allow the cost of health insurance for Americans who rely on employer-sponsored health insurance to reach 26 percent of total compensation by 2019.  More than 1/4^th of your pay will go to health insurance.
• Pay private health insurance companies 14 percent or more to provide the same level of benefits to Medicare recipients as regular Medicare.
• Keep the donut hole in Medicare Part D that has forced more than 4 million seniors every year to pay exorbitant costs out of pocket or go without the drugs they need.
• Insure that Medicare will run out of money in 8 years.
• Cut funding for investigation of Medicare abuse and fraud by $250 million over the next decade.
• Increase the deficit by more than $100 billion over the next ten years – and more than $1 trillion over the ten years after that.  In other words, increase the deficit by $1,100,000,000 over the next 20 years.

Is this what you want?  If not, you need to get on the phone to your Congressman and say in no uncertain terms:  “LEAVE MY HEALTH CARE ALONE!!”