Hillarycare, Anyone? (1992 Hillarycare might end up the nostalgic favorite

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-health15feb15,0,5430545,print.story
EDITORIAL
Hillarycare, Anyone?

February 15, 2005

The grand debate on the United States' most serious moral and fiscal problem has begun. Congress, the White House and state governments are fixated on healthcare, on its spiraling costs (consuming one-quarter of the nation's economic growth since 2000) and on the shame of 45 million people being without health insurance.

Oh, sorry. Wrong universe. Maybe privatizing Social Security and banning gay marriage really are more important. If so, there's a lot we have to concentrate on ignoring.

As a Boston University study released last week shows, healthcare costs, which are rising far faster than inflation, are beginning to cripple the ability of companies to compete globally and threatening to bankrupt counties that care for the poor. Per-person costs in the U.S. are two times higher than those of Canada, France, Germany and Britain — which, by the way, provide healthcare to all their citizens.

President Bush isn't without proposals for healthcare, but they're not big enough or even in the right direction. He's asking for expansions of tax breaks for individuals to buy their own healthcare and for new insurance purchasing pools for small employers, to be financed by slashing Medicaid payments to states. It's like trying to pull in Moby Dick with a fly rod. The tax breaks are too small to allow low-income families to buy a real policy. The purchasing pools would let insurers pick and choose, offering low rates only to industries with young, healthy populations.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

[rodeodance]

1. 'The chief beneficiary of this? Pharmaceutical companies",==immoral!!

Some of the Bush plan is guaranteed to make the situation worse, a fact that is slowly dawning on Congress. A number of Republicans are openly angry over the administration's announcement last week that the Medicare drug benefit that it sold to Congress in 2003 as costing $400 billion over a decade will instead cost at least $720 billion. The chief beneficiary of this? Pharmaceutical companies, because the benefit specifically bans the federal government from negotiating with them for lower prices.

[papau]

2. yep - half of the cost is a bribe to the drug companies.

:-)

:-(

:-)

[Moderator]

3. papau

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
copyrighted news source.



Thank you.


DU Moderator

[papau]

4. Not having a good day - sorry

Sorry about the 2 extra paragraphs

but the time to edit says I can't edit

[Dr Ron]

5. No Hilary Care

There are many problems with Bush's health care policies, but Hilary's program was also awful.

Ironically, while there are many differences in their approaches, both have one fault in common--over use of HMO's.

[papau]

6. She was forced by Bill to give up single payer so as to get Ins Co

support for her plan - we promised - God - the folks in insurance - casualty insurance (not my part of the business) have the ethics of a GOPer-

In any case that led to the HMO approach

God only knows what Bush is thinking in terms of health care.

[Dr Ron]

7. Those aren't the only choices

It isn't a choice of single payer versus Hilary Care.

Kerry had a plan which extended health care coverage without either the degree of government intrusion or use of governent to steer people towards HMO's as was present in Hilary's plan.

[eridani]

8. If it isn't UNIVERSAL, fuck it!

We are already paying for universal health care, we just aren't getting it.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. The insurance companies have gotten so arrogant and infuraiated so

many people, that I could see a politician winning votes by saying, "The insurance companies are vultures and do not deserve to be involved in making health care decisions."

Who would argue with that except people who work in the health insurance divisions of insurance companies?

[The Zanti Regent]

10. Watch them resurrect Harry and Louise...

...Boiled my blood so much in 1992, seeing those assholes tear Hillary apart.

Meanwhile my parents lost their house and life savings paying for my mother's medical care after she was crippled in a car wreck...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. If they resurrect Harry and Louise

the Dems can run "horror story" ads on the one hand and "happy story" ads on the other, like the one about my friend who got free treatment for car accident injuries in Costa Rica.

[98geoduck]

11. Why do republicans think Americans should be worse off than the rest

of "first world" Societies.