America, You May Now Get Sick: The Top Ten Immediate Changes for Healthcare

 The Happy Healthcare Dance

Well, as most of you who do not live under a rock know by now, the historic new national healthcare bill passed last night. As one of millions who are either uninsured or who were about to be uninsured, I'm pretty pleased. For skeptics, the confused, people like me who have trouble sifting through it all, or if you're just curious, I've found a nice little list from HuffingtonPost of the top ten things the new bill will be doing immediately, and some of them are pretty cool:

The legislation will:

• Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans;
• Provide immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition through a temporary high-risk pool;
• Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all individual plans;
• Lower seniors' prescription drug prices by beginning to close the donut hole;
• Offer tax credits to small businesses to purchase coverage;
• Eliminate lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits in all plans;
• Require plans to cover an enrollee's dependent children until age 26;
• Require new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;
• Ensure consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal new insurance plan decisions;
• Require premium rebates to enrollees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and require public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs.

-K, the insured!