To make quality, affordable health care available to all Americans, reduce
costs, improve health care quality, enhance disease prevention, and
strengthen the health care workforce.
First Page States:
To make quality, affordable health care available to all Americans,reduce costs, improve health care quality, enhancedisease prevention, and strengthen the health care workforce.
1 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa2tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
3 SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS.
4 (a) SHORT TITLE.—This Act may be cited as the
5 ‘‘Affordable Health Choices Act’’.
6 (b) TABLE OF CONTENTS.—The table of contents of7 this Act is as follows:
Not much to say about that, title and introduction of the table of contents. The next five pages up to the top of Page 7 is the Table of Contents and I am not going to review that.
The Senate decided to mostly avoid creating a new bill and decided to amend the Public Health Services Act. I guess. I have referred to the Public Services Health Act before. It was in the House Bill, but, the entire House Bill was not an amendment to it. Let's see where this goes. It seems a little whimpy to me.
Page 7, lines 8 through 15:
SEC. 101. AMENDMENT TO THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE ACT.
Part A of title XXVII of the Public Health Service
Act (42 U.S.C. 300gg et seq.) is amended—
(1) by striking the part heading and inserting the following:
‘‘PART A—INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP MARKET REFORMS’’;
Page 7, lines 19 through 23 and Page 8, lines 1 and 2:
‘‘SEC. 2705. PROHIBITION OF PREEXISTING CONDITION EXCLUSIONS OR OTHER DISCRIMINATION BASED ON HEALTH STATUS.
‘‘(a) IN GENERAL.—A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not impose any preexisting condition exclusion with respect to such plan or coverage.’’; and
I need to simply reveiw the long version. The short version ALREADY lacks 'legal stature' and maybe it was changed in the second version of the bill.
Example. Above is a statement. The statement doesn't give definitions and I paged through fifty pages of the bill and there are no definitions that I have noted. What does that mean? Well. What is a Pre-Existing Condition and when does the law apply? The bill, in this form, is empty. It requires definitions, otherwise, it will end up in court and most people won't have the monies to seek legal advise everytime they go to the physican. It turns over the legislation to the health care industry to define all its provisions on its own terms. The House Bill is a superior bill and it should take precedent over the Senate Bill.
I'll find the longer version. Maybe there is actually something worthwhile in it.
