A few days ago, an email came my way with dozens of surprising claims about the content of the health reform legislation being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives (HR 3200).
Most of the claims were so outrageous that I decided to check the bill’s text to determine their accuracy. For those of you who want to get a sense of the quantity and quality of false claims currently in circulation along with some ways to respond to them, I am posting my responses below.
That an untold number of Americans, possibly millions (these emails travel quickly) may have read and believed such claims causes me real concern. I believe that lies need to be subjected to the cleansing light of truth. This is particularly urgent in the next several weeks as the health reform debate enters its most pivotal moments.
There several dozen false claims in the viral email, each referring to a particular page in the bill where the text of the bill is said to support the claim. In virtually all cases, it doesn’t. It’s the classic Big Lie strategy – tell enough lies and people will think that where there’s smoke, there must be fire.
Update 8/1/09: I have discovered that the original source of the anti-health reform email is Liberty Counsel, a spinoff of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, whose founder was the Rev. Jerry Fallwell. In and of itself, that does not speak for or against the validity of its claims, though it may be helpful for context. The version of the email I received tracks extremely closely (though not precisely) with the Liberty Counsel document.
The page numbers below refer to HR 3200, the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. (Link to full text of bill)
1. Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure!
Response: This description is meant to conjure up images of the IRS auditing all self-insured plans and sending thousands of law-abiding employers to jail. This legislative language does nothing of the sort. It is, instead, an accountability measure to study, among other things, whether self-insured companies have sufficient assets to deliver the care they have contracted to deliver, and whether the incentives in the reformed system are delivering their intended results. You can’t tell whether something is working well without gathering the data. This is about having the evidence to use as a basis for evidence-based policy.
Update: A reader asks whether this study will involve all self-insured plans. The text of the bill doesn’t spell this out, but normally a random sampling would be the methodology of choice.
2. Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed!
Response: Sorry, no such text in the bill. This is a false claim meant to terrify you and your loved ones. The actual legislative language here is about cost sharing, co-pays, and minimum services that policies must cover. Our current system rations based on the ability to pay. Insurance companies ration by limiting coverage in a variety of ways. Much as we might wish for it, neither the current system nor any reformed system will be able to avoid saying no some of the time. The question is whether those decisions are driven by corporate profit-seeking or some other mechanism and motivation. More after the jump
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