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).
Gives HHS extremely vague orders to “establish a process for the annual review of increases in premiums for health insurance coverage,” and further specifies that, “the process shall require health insurers to submit a justification for any premium increases prior to implementation of the increase.” This is an open invitation to politicized federal insurance rate regulation that could result in insurers being prevented from raising rates to cover increased claims costs, potentially forcing insurers into insolvency and leaving policyholders liable for provider claims.
The Sunday Times reports:
The legitimacy of the $100 billion (£60 billion) carbon-trading market has been called into question after the world’s largest auditor of clean-energy projects was suspended by United Nations inspectors.
SGS UK had its accreditation suspended last week after it was unable to prove its staff had properly vetted projects that were then approved for the carbon-trading scheme, or even that they were qualified to do so.
As we have noted before, among the many reasons carbon cap and trading is destined to fail is because auditing carbon emissions reductions accurately enough to support a carbon credit “market” is simply impossible. New Zealand Climate Science Coalition chairman Bryan Leyland explains:
So, to my knowledge, carbon trading is the only commodity trading where it is impossible to establish with reasonable accuracy how much is being bought and sold, where the commodity that is traded is invisible and can perform no useful purpose for the purchaser, and where both parties benefit if the quantities traded have been exaggerated. … It is, therefore, an open invitation to fraud and that is exactly what is happening all over the world.
In fact this is the exact same reason the economists who originally came up with the idea of cap and trade as a way to combat pollution believe that cap and trade is a terrible fit for carbon:
The first is that carbon emissions are a global problem with myriad sources. Cap-and-trade, he says, is better suited for discrete, local pollution problems. “It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally,” he says. “There are no institutions right now that have that power.”