Democrat Edwards offers universal health care plan

[JohnLocke]

Democrat Edwards offers universal health care plan
By John Whitesides--Reuters
Monday, February 5, 2007
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards on Monday proposed spending up to $120 billion a year to fix a "dysfunctional" health care system by requiring health insurance for all Americans and helping to make it more affordable.
Edwards said his health care plan, the first offered by a 2008 White House candidate, was designed to force private companies, government and individuals to share responsibility for insurance coverage.
The price tag would be covered by eliminating President George W. Bush's tax cuts for those making more than $200,000 a year and by cracking down on unpaid taxes, he said.
He said his plan could succeed where others have failed in part because the political climate has changed. Finding ways to cover nearly 47 million uninsured Americans and make health care more affordable and efficient will be at the center of the 2008 campaign debate, he said.
"Our health care system has grown more dysfunctional in the last few years," Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, said in a Reuters interview.
"The undercurrent for health care reform has become more powerful," he said. "People are concerned, not only about the millions of Americans without health care coverage, but if they have it that they will lose it and the cost is so high."
(...)
Other Democratic presidential candidates, including Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, support a goal of universal health care but have not offered concrete plans yet on how to get there.
(...)
He said the problem was worse now and would be one of the top three campaign issues in 2008, along with the war in Iraq and energy dependency.
"We can't make America stronger with incremental changes," he said. "We need significant, transformational change — it's true in health care, it's true in energy and it's true in how America deals with the world."
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Read the rest here.

[ohioINC]

1. Trial Lawyer 08

If anyone could get universal health care through Washington it would be a trial lawyer. And he was dead sexy as he installed insulation in an elderly womans basement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM8n9vfZBg8&eurl=

[VOX]

5. Edwards is a Democratic candidate...

So why not save the name-calling and venom for the all the right-wing Republican candidates in the pipeline??????

:shrug:

[Donnachaidh]

2. pie in the sky

I'd like to see something with a little more than pretty promises.

[aquart]

3. They aren't even that pretty.

This still puts the money into the hands of the insurance companies rather than the doctors, nurses, research, care.

Is there a provision that prevents cherrypicking?

[Vinca]

4. This isn't universal health care. It's universal insurance.

Big difference. Most people without insurance won't be helped by a low cost, low benefit policy with a huge deductible and copay. They'll avoid care because they can't pay for both premiums and copays. People with insurance won't be helped if they have a gigantic deductible they can't meet when illness strikes. As it is, people with health insurance file for bankruptcy more than those that don't. I'm disappointed with Edwards on this one. True universal health care will require the elimination of the insurance companies from the mix.

[GreenArrow]

6. it's MANDATORY insurance

at that, a double insult.

[KingofNewOrleans]

7. We can debate Edwards plan versus the other

plans, when any of the other candidates actually offer one.

[chimpymustgo]

8. NYT's Krugman: "Edwards Gets It Right".

Edwards Gets It Right

By PAUL KRUGMAN

-snip-

Many other people are uninsured because they simply can’t afford the cost. So the Edwards plan, again like other proposals, offers financial aid to help lower-income families buy insurance. To pay for this aid, he proposes rolling back tax cuts for households with incomes over $200,000 a year.

Finally, some people try to save money by going without coverage, so if they get sick they end up in emergency rooms at public expense. Like other plans, the Edwards plan would “require all American residents to get insurance,” and would require that all employers either provide insurance to their workers or pay a percentage of their payrolls into a government fund used to buy insurance.

But Mr. Edwards goes two steps further.

People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.

-snip-

And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. “Over time,” the press release says, “the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.”

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.

Yes, that includes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So far, all we have from Mr. Obama is inspiring rhetoric about universal care — that’s great, but how do we get there? And how do we know whether Mrs. Clinton, who says that she’s “not ready to be specific,” and that she wants to “build the consensus first,” will really be willing to take on this issue again?

-snip-

http://wealthyfrenchman.blogspot.com/2007/02/edwards-gets-it-right.html