Key Issues Keep Affordable Health Insurance Bill at Bay
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Neatly summed up by the Associated Press, these include the staggering cost, creating a government run plan, taxing workers' benefits, and penalizing employers that don't offer coverage to workers.
It's proving to be a nasty and complicated process to revamp health care, and provide affordable health insurance to the 47 million uninsured Americans out there right now.
The issue of cost is an easy one to understand: ranging from 1 to 2 trillion dollars, it's ironic that providing an affordable health insurance option won't come cheap. And, as the country struggles to free itself from a terrible economic situation, racking up new costs doesn't seem quite smart.
However, there's also the issue of billions of dollars lost for covering the uninsured and for dealing with inadequate medical record-keeping, which could save us money if we could minimize their costs.
Taxing worker's benefits and penalizing employers who don't offer coverage is a big issue with labor unions, who suggest that this will squash economic growth. These options aren't very popular, but affordable health insurance won't be affordable unless someone pays for it, and health care costs are going nowhere but up.
And the most contentious of all is the potential to create a government-run health insurance plan. Republicans argue that by providing such an option, the private insurance market will be driven into the ground.
In contrast, Democrats argue that the private insurance market, not known for its "customer friendly" policies these days, needs the competition in order to force them to lower costs and revamp the policies that could make their product more appealing to the public.