Hillarycare again?

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/09/17/health.care/index.html

There are certain aspects to this idea that are appealing, though I'd have to read an actual bill first. But otherwise, it's inherently flawed.

1) Health coverage becomes mandatory in the way auto/home insurance is now in most states. That's fine.

2) Government offers tax credits to those that can't afford it (read: poor people). I'm not necessarily big on that by itself. I'd say anyone below upper middle class professionals should get a tax credit for providing their own insurance instead of taking what their employer gives them, with the poor in general getting subsidy (with some measures taken to recoup the subsidy by taxing behaviors which contribute to ill-health). The Clinton plan instead keeps the onus on large corporations to pay for their employees using large and often ill-conceived types of coverage. The days of employer-paid benefits are over. Those days started during the 1940s when wage controls were put in place and employers needed to offer benefits to attract workers. Today, benefits are hideously expensive to offer even with the group rates achieved by large numbers of workers. And workers don't have careers anymore. So having to jump from one employer-benefit plan to the next is not a viable solution. Any legislation should reflect that our work force is no longer career-based but instead a much more mobile one or even temporary/part-time. This fails miserably to recognize that problem.

3) Require insurers to take anyone who applies. I can live with insurance being available to anyone, including people with various dread diseases. But it should be highly expensive for such people. Consider that, other than the preservation of life in such a case, what else matters? You want to live, you're going to have to pay up. Reversing or even just slowing down death is not cheap people. Or else subsidized by charging healthy people more. I personally choose the first option. I'm not sure this plan does as it bars insurance companies from charging far more than the actual premium. That means healthy people won't subsidize it and probably the unhealthy people won't either. I suspect the end result is a lot of denied claims because health insurance doesn't strike me as a particularly profitable form of insurance. People actually use it. It's sort of like homeowners insurance in say Florida.

4) I was greatly amused by the Edwards counter-proposal in which he claimed to cut off benefits for Congress and the Prez if socialized medicine was not approved in 2009. Edwards has always struck me as a doofus. More evidence was not needed, but thanks though.

5) Nothing in this plan actually reduces the demand for health care. If anything it will increase it. That's a serious problem that will have to be addressed with complimentary legislation before I could give this one a pass. BEFORE, not during. Socialized health care has to be a secondary legislation. How we as a society provide fiscally for our health care is secondary to the actual problems of how we receive it and how much we need it. Those issues need to be addressed somehow on a grander scale. They have not been here or otherwise. As a result the supposed $110B price tag is a sham. It'll cost more than that, if not directly, than certainly through indirect subsidy to corporations and/or individuals. Even if that's all it costs, I'd like to know where the money is coming from for it? Pork projects and flagging war efforts are only going to back some of that... ah yes there it is. Raise taxes.

6) And then the final blow. Hillary has already put out that privatization is off the table. Which is not good. Any idea for the reform of health care should allow for and even encourage individuals to have free and competitive markets in which to find and purchase affordable coverage of their choosing. Right now there are problems with that market, which can be addressed through a combination of new regulations (ie better compliance for the provision of needed care) and deregulation in other areas (interstate or even international competitions for example). There are privatized plans (HSAs) that actually make sense for a majority of uninsured Americans, if they could be made even more affordable still through tax credits or the like, so be it.