How not to win support ( aka Kennedy’s a hipaacrite )
Posted by Moonage on 31 Jan 2006 | Tagged as: Health Care Debate
Ted Kennedy thinks we need to address health care reform. Bully for him. This is how he’s going about gaining the support he needs to get it done:
"Health savings accounts €¦ may work for a few young people that are very, very, healthy," Kennedy said. "We are finding every day more and more families are losing their health care, and the prescription-drug program is a disaster."
"More than 2,000 people every single day are uninsured. If the president is going to follow the fiasco we had on Social Security, we are going to have more gimmicks."
Now, people may very well have forgotten that Kennedy has some room to criticize. He helped push through a bill that made some changes in health care provision in 1996. At the time it was called the Kennedy Kassebaum Bill (PL 104-191), nowadays, it’s simply called HIPAA.
Now, do understand my opinions on HIPAA:
- The privacy standards of HIPAA are 93 pages.
- The Civil Rights addendum are 44 pages.
- The Health and Human Rights summary is 25 pages.
- To figure out if HIPAA applies to you,
To determine if a natural person, business, or government agency is a covered entity, go to the tool(s) that apply to the person, business, or agency, and answer the questions until you receive an answer. If you are uncertain about which tool(s) applies, answer the questions on all of the tools. Many terms used in the tools are defined terms or have a special meaning. The definitions or special meanings will appear as footnotes on the relevant questions’ pages to assist you.
Covered Entity Charts
This guidance on how to determine whether an entity is a covered entity under the Administrative Simplification provisions of HIPAA is also available in a Covered Entity Flowchart (PDF, 61.4KB).
- It accomplishes nothing. It redefined existing COBRA laws and made them stricter. What it did NOT do is require the private insurance carrier they had to keep the existing rate. In other words, if you were fired, and very sick, your premium would be prohibitively expensive. But, the insurance carrier could not drop you. They just waited for you to run out of money and drop it. That’s all.
- It was such a cumbersome and unpopular mess that they made it retroactive until AFTER the next president took office. As such, liberals did everything they could to say it was Bush’s fault.
It wasn’t Bush’s animal. It was Ted Kennedy’s. Now, he wants you to believe HIPAA is what should be done to the entire health industry. And, more than anything else, Ted Kennedy once again expects you to forget about what he’s done in the past and simply trust him in the future. When he owns up to his own fiascos, then maybe people like me won’t be so harsh on the ones he’s proposing now.
- Technorati Ted Kennedy, HIPAA, Kennedy Kassebaum Bill, health care reform, social security
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