Universal Care: Getting The Right Mix (about saturday's conference about Healthcare)

[Mass]

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)

[Crazy Dave]

1. K & R

:kick: :thumbsup:

[nannah]

2. access to health care needs to be separated from employment,

and access to health insurance in not access to health care. i believe access to health care needs to be through a single payer system, funded through taxes. the billions of dollars paid for health insurance can be redirected into public sector administered, fee for service, health care. this concept is inclusive of all health care services including nutrition, physical therapy, occupational therapy, medications, mental health treatment, chemically dependency treatment, hospitalization long and short term, in home health care, all health care services. a huge benefit of this approach is the change to motivations for health maintenance and an ability to really track costs and benefits from treatments. and a system of fees can be set that can be justified and sustained. the radical element of this idea is that it requires a spirit of cooperation rather than competition among all health care providers to really explore cost effective ways to treat illness and educate people to maintain their health.

the big advantage the US has in setting this system in place is access to computer technology to sort through available data and begin to address issues of interface among health care systems; older systems around the globe were set up without this technologically driven organizational advantage.

[Mass]

3. This is pretty much what I have noted about these candidates.

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).

Add to that the fact that, even if Hill diagnosed the problem, she does not present an adequate solution (at least at this point), and you will have how I see the candidates on most of the issues.

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. Kick the insurance companies out of the equation. They will have to make their money on the

dozens of other types of insurance out there.

[Mass]

5. More comments about the debate

from TomPayne.com

A Healthy Health Care Debate
Jacob S. Hacker
March 26, 2007
...

What a difference a year makes. Just 12 short months ago, health care was nowhere on the political agenda, and pundits were confidently stating that, after the failure of the Clinton health plan a dozen years prior, Americans continued to be wary of serious action. Affordable, quality health care for all Americans was a pipe dream.

...

Why now? Surely, American health financing is a mess. The United States spends far more than any other nation on health care, yet leaves nearly 50 million of its residents uninsured. Even insured Americans are pervasively insecure. Medical costs and health premiums are skyrocketing while employers are cutting back on coverage, and medical debt is a mounting even among the middle class. Perhaps half of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are due, at least in part, to medical costs and crises.

But while these problems are substantially worse than they were when Bill and Hillary Clinton, as president and first lady, pledged to provide health security to all Americans, they are not qualitatively different. What’s really changed is perceptions of the politically possible. The 2006 midterm featured a highly successful drive by winning Democrats to highlight the insecurities created by the new economy, especially on health care. Yet it’s three deeper changes in the debate that best explain why bold reform plans, rather than piecemeal fixes, were talked about on the campaign trail in 2006 and are now atop the agenda.

...

[Mass]

6. Concerning the Healthcare debate, a series of posts by Bill Scherr on the new blog of America's

Future.

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/

Among them

The Health Care Questions I Still Have

Submitted by Bill Scher on Mon, 2007-03-26 18:05.

After watching Saturday's presidential candidate forum on health care, and judging the candidates using Roger Hickey's five health care questions, I'm left with key questions for each Oval Office aspirant.

...

To Sen. Hillary Clinton: You accurately identified the problem with private insurers, how they make a profit by either trying to "avoid insuring you" or "try to avoid paying for the health care you receive." But the 1993 health care plan you supported solely relied on private insurers to deliver health care coverage. Will you commit to offering some sort of public plan so we can reduce our reliance on private insurers?

To Sen. Barack Obama: The principles you laid out appear to track the plan that John Edwards has offered. In fact, you called Edwards' plan "very credible." What can you propose that would improve upon the Edwards plan?

To Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. Chris Dodd: Are you actually pledging to achieve universal coverage, or are you only offering universal "access" to coverage, which will allow some to fall through the cracks?

To Rep. Dennis Kucinich: You make a compelling case for an immediate move to a single-payer system, but how do you convince those Americans who are content with their coverage that such a system won't take away what they have?
..

[Mass]

7. delete