Health Care "Reform"?

So, the health care reform bills coming out of Congress.  Were they purposely designed to make the problem worse, or are our law makers just that incompetent?

1) By requiring consumers to buy insurance or pay penalties, they are making demand inelastic, which will drive prices up.  It's basic Econ 101 stuff, folks.

2) They've set the fines for failure to get insurance significantly below the cost of insurance even with the new subsidies.  Intentionally.  The fine maximums are tied to insurance policy costs.  The problem has never been that people could get insurance and chose not to, but rather that they can't afford it.  This does nothing to address that root problem.  What's going to happen -- I might go so far to say what is obviously going to happen -- is that we will go from a country with millions of people who are uninsured, to a country with millions of people who are uninsured and paying for the 'privilege'.

And no 'big picture' price controls that I can see.  I've found limits on how much more companies can charge their older clients compared to their younger ones (2 or 3 times, depending on the bill), and how much they can charge sick clients compared to healthy ones (no difference allowed), but nowhere is there a limit to how much they can charge a person relative to their income, or relative to some external measure like Cost of Living Index or something.

So, basically insurance companies can charge whatever they want as long as they do it across the board in the proper ratios, and we the consumers are legally required to either pay it or pay a lesser amount for absolutely nothing.

This is supposed to be helpful?  How?  I mean, the parts about no longer allowing people to be disallowed or dropped because of health issues are good, but this forced consumerism, I just don't see how it's possibly going to help.  At best I think the effect would be neutral, but honestly I think it's going to hurt a LOT of people.

(The cynical part of me also notes that neither plan goes into effect until after the next Presidential election.  Oh hell yes I believe that part is by design.)

Now, if the master plan is to screw up the insurance industry so bad that the whole racket collapses and then we can do real reform without that pesky lobbying block in the way, great!  I'm behind that goal, and their plan looks well conceived, if a little blatant, for fulfilling that aim.  The pain we'll feel in the meantime sucks, but we gotta get rid of them somehow and this allows impact to the economy to be slower than just putting them all out of business  at once.

On the other hand, if the master plan with this bill is to help people who are getting screwed currently...  Fail.  Complete Fail.  Epic Fail.  It's not even out of the gate yet and it, and the lawmakers responsible for it, are Made Of Fail.