Universal Care: Getting The Right Mix
Roger Hickey
March 26, 2007
Roger Hickey is the co-chair of Campaign for America’s Future.
At Saturday’s health care forum for presidential candidates, John Edwards was bold, detailed and specific—but didn’t diagnose the problem. Barack Obama was vague—but stressed that no president can do it without the people. Dennis Kucinich diagnosed the problem, and pushed immediate transformation. Hillary Clinton, surprisingly, forcefully adopted Kucinich’s diagnosis (before he spoke). Put them all together—in the right way—and you have a winning health care plan.
...
Everyone expected former senator Edwards to stress the specifics of his plan for health care for all, and he did. The audience was not so prepared for Obama’s vagueness, but the Illinois senator stuck to principles on the grounds that he was still working on his plan. But the real surprise was Clinton’s forceful diagnosis of the health care problem—and of her failure to win coverage for all in her husband’s administration.
The New York senator pointed to the power and greed of the insurance industry. She told the Nevada crowd that the failure of her proposal for universal coverage in 1994 made her more determined to achieve the goal now. As reported by Robert Pear in Sunday’s New York Times, Clinton declared, “ also makes me understand what we are up against. We have to modernize and reform the way we deliver health care. But we have to change the way we finance it. That’s going to mean taking money away from people who make out really well right now.” Pressed to explain what she meant by moderator Karen Tumulty of Time , she complained that:
…Insurance companies make money by spending a lot of money, and employing a lot of people, to avoid insuring you, and then if you’re insured, they try to avoid paying for the health care you receive.
(Monday’s front-page story in The New York Times offers a particularly vivid example of that in the long-term care industry.)
With that, Clinton established a strong starting point for an explanation that most Americans can understand about why health care is in crisis. She also announced she would soon introduce legislation to “require that every insurance company had to insure everybody, with no exclusion for pre-existing conditions.”
And with that, Hillary left open the question each of the major candidates need to answer: If the insurance industry is the problem, do we want them to be the centerpiece of an expanded system of subsidies and regulations to try to “incentivize” or force them to cover everyone? And if we go down that road, will we ever get health care costs under control?
...
To read the answers each candidate made to the question, read the full article
here (Note: I am not a Hillary supporter, far from it, but neither is Campaign for America's future, so it was surprising to read)