Senate Health Bill Would Wreck the Individual Insurance Market

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This is tentative, but….

I’ve just taken a quick look at the Senate health care bill. Neither preexisting nor continuous are anywhere in the bill. None of the section titles deal with preexisting conditions. It doesn’t appear that the Senate bill affects Obamacare’s protections for preexisting conditions at all. This is almost certainly because the Senate parliamentarian ruled that it had nothing to do with spending or outlays, and therefore couldn’t be included in a reconciliation bill.

The Senate bill also abolishes Obamacare’s individual mandate penalties. The net result is that if this bill passes, people will be free to go without insurance while they’re healthy, and then buy insurance if and when they get seriously ill. This is a disaster for the health insurance industry.

I don’t see how insurance companies can continue to dither at this point. The Senate bill would almost certainly be a huge financial blow to anyone who stays in the individual insurance business, and since the wording is driven by reconciliation rules it means that any final bill negotiated with the House would have to be the same. They can’t possibly accept this, can they?

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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