A lot of people have linked to this article already. It's an important read:
If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company's Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests -- you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills that herald a health-care revolution.
In short, the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.
The five freedoms that would be lost are:
1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan;
2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs;
3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage;
4. Freedom to keep your existing plan;
5. Freedom to choose your doctors.
Go ahead, read the whole thing. Essentially, the government will control your consumer choice when you're trying to find the health insurance that matches your family's needs. We shop for our own insurance. We compare the costs and benefits of each plan. Under ObamaCare, those decisions would be made for us. We'd lose that freedom.
