Henny Penny! Stop listening to Foxy Loxy!

I promised that I would look into the claim that if one loses one's job hence one's insurance (if provided by one's employer,whether or not COBRA comes into play), and if one finds another job with health insurance, one would be prohibited from signing up for the new plan or any other plan. One would be obligated to take the government option and nothing else.

I have not been able to find any proof of that in all the websites I searched. I think it is purely a scare tactic.

Aunt Clela forwarded two e-mails to me and I suppose to all of you. The first made the above claim. It quoted an opinion piece (not a journalistic report) from the Investors' Business Daily that takes one sentence out of context and extrapolates onward to make the above claim. I read it on their website. The editorial itself only mentioned this at the beginning and used it as a springboard to other health care concerns. Odd.

I did find something else on the website of RMS Consultants, a right wing blog/mag type of publication that claims that one would be obliged to take a government plan if one left a company and decided to go into business for oneself. This makes perfect sense to me. I figure, but don't know, that once one can prove to the government that one has purchased private insurance elsewhere, one can drop the public option. But one must be insured if working on one's own.

In a video posted on U-Tube of Paul Ryan, a Congressman from Wisconsin (or was it Minnesota), the notion was supposed be that the above claim was proven. But it wasn't, the context of the video was too narrow to get the full meaning, it seemed to me that the Congressman was told by a witness in a congressional hearing that one would not be allowed to step out of a cooperative one had joined in order to buy private insurance. I am not sure of the entire context, but this doesn't seem to support the claim.

Conservative Blogger Cory Cramer said he had heard the claim, and promised to look into it, but I didn't find a follow-up.

I stick with my original belief: this claim is so egregious that surely, surely, those against the health care plan (R and D) would seize upon this and scream it to the heavens given all the screaming they do. But no. Nothing. Surely the insurance companies who are going through this plan with a fine tooth comb would go ballistic, TV ads, letters to those they have accepted to insure, surely they who would be utterly destroyed by it, would make it public with the greatest spin possible. But no. Nothing.

There is a great deal of fear mongering out there. The most recent has to do with scaring the aged. Medicare and Medicaid will be cut and whittled away, you will be mandatorily advised on the benefits of euthanasia, the government will step in and do your estate planning and so on.

And the e-mail-o-sphere is churning!