EDITORIAL: Secret gets out

April 30--Health care policy, as President Donald Trump says he has discovered, "is complicated." Not only that, but as a political issue it is hyperpartisan. So, how can citizens parse health care legislation to determine if it is good for them?

Thankfully, the latest version of health care legislation to be approved by House Republicans includes a sure-fire indication that the bill stinks: It exempts from its provisions members of Congress themselves and their staffs .

Nothing, indeed, is simple about the health care law. It took a health law professor, Timothy Jost of Washington & Lee University, to discover the exemption.

The bill would allow states, rather than the federal government, to eliminate in 2020 Obamacare's rule that insurers may not deny coverage and may not excessively price coverage due to pre-existing conditions.

According to the Pennsylvania Health Access Network, eliminating the price protection in Pennsylvania would cost the average health insurance customer more than $3,000 a year. And it estimated that, since the bill also would allow insurers to vastly increase the ratio by which they are allowed to price coverage for older consumers, older Pennsylvanians could face a five-fold increase in costs.

Small wonder, then, that proponents of this travesty would exempt themselves from it. So an insurer in South Dakata, say, could deny or exorbitantly price coverage for anyone with a pre-existing condition -- which means just about everyone -- except the state's House member, two senators and their staffs.

Now that the language has been discovered, Republican leaders say they will scrap it. But the attempt to sneak the provision into the law is proof enough that the entire bill should fail.

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