The Clinton Health Plan Redux
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 11:10PM I admit I was taken by surprise when Hillary Clinton announced a plan for healthcare reform earlier this week. Variously called (with some implied derision) Clinton Healthcare 2.0, Hillary Plan 2.o, or worst, Hillarycare, this new proposal is a scaled-back version of the plan she and her husband proposed in 1993. It calls for an increased government presence in the healthcare market, but includes a significant role for private insurance companies. Most controversially, it requires all citizens to carry health insurance, whether private or government provided.
As of yet I have not reviewed the plan in detail, but I wanted to make at least one timely comment. Ms. Clinton will, as she was in 1993, be taken to the woodshed over every detail in her new plan. The abuse will come, almost exclusively, from loudmouths who have no health care reform program of their own. These complainers will come from two groups: the Ostriches who think U.S. healthcare is perfect as it is, and the Cloistered Privileged who believe we are only one or two tax credits away from health nirvana.
It is not a foregone conclusion that I will vote for Clinton given the opportunity. However, she earned my respect in 1993 and earns it all over again with her new proposal. In the 14 years since the Clintons put forward their original healthcare reform plan, only one other serious politician has proposed an equally comprehensive plan, and that is John Edwards. That alone shows how much political courage it takes to attempt healthcare reform in this country.
And she didn't have to stick her neck out again this time. She is ahead in all the polls; there was no need for her to take this political risk. That she did tells me that she is serious about getting reform legislation through if elected president, and that is encouraging.
While Clinton proposes real reform, the Bush people are in a fistfight right now to block improvements to the State Children's Health Insurance Plan, or SCHIP, an extension of Medicaid that provides health coverage to children whose parents make too much money to qualify for regular Medicaid. SCHIP covers 4 million children, and the stubborn White House is threatening to veto any enhancement to the plan that would allow it to cover more kids. In fact, the Bushies want to cover fewer kids, not more. A presidential administration that won't come to an agreement with Congress over a program that covers less than 2% of Americans is clearly incapable of addressing the interests of the other 98%. (Hey, I have an idea -- let's impeach him!)
In school, I was educated under the Baconian ideal (or Jeffersonian, if you please) that the path to healthy debate is to put all ideas, no matter how silly, on the table and then sort through them, synthesizing and winnowing until a useful solution emerges. Deriding serious ideas like this one, especially when there are no other politicians proposing anything else, is a clear violation of this spirit of free debate.
Let the woman talk. Let her opponents present their own plans. But the one unacceptable outcome is the one we endured in 1993 -- to shoot down the only idea out there, and then do absolutely nothing.
Michael Hebert
The original version of this article stated that Hillary Clinton is the only major politician to put forth a health reform proposal since 1993. I amended this when I discovered that John Edwards has his own plan. I apologize, especially to the Edwards campaign, for the error.
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Reader Comments (8)
To the general public, there will be scare stories about waiting forever to see a doctor. I think they'll go with "I had to wait a month to get my painful cavity/broken tooth pulled" first.
To the wealthy, the message will be about children having to wait to see a doctor because the clinics are full of unwed welfare mothers.
To the rednecks, the unsubtle message will be something along the lines of woman president = woman driver.
Of course, I'm not exactly seeing into the future. All this has been happening already, just lower in volume.
In some ways, the war in Iraq may be taking care of itself. I have a suspicion that a national concensus will emerge before the elections (one in which we do draw down, but do not leave).
A lot of people have tried to pin the blame of the crumbling health care system on the Clinton proposal, but this is not fair. Clinton tried. Who else has tried? When the Clinton plan went down in flames, no one jumped into the breach with a new proposal. There was a awkward silence, somebody coughed, and the crowd slunk home.
In fact, the last meaningful health care reform in the U.S. was the establishment of the SCHIPs program, an extension of Medicaid that covers 8 million children. The Clinton administration passed that in 1998.
There has been a burr under my saddle for 14 years regarding Hilary and that so called health reform. I am sure it is not going to change much.
True CHIPS has been a great plan for uninsured and underinsured children. Here in North Texas we have seen a trend of Physicians refusing SCHIPS and Medicaid due to the poor reimbursed claims.
Attention must be brought to this matter.
There are two inflation rates.
One is real and the other is what we notice. Prices of household goods have risen only slightly due to outsourcing, but we can't outsource medicine to a large degree.
Private Industry Staffing still does get raises, but it's not readily noticed in private industry because prices are kept low from outsourcing, However this is not true with medicine. In fact medical workers salaries have lagged behind the rest of American industry. Nurses and Pharmacist did shoot up in California and Part of Texas. Government extreme cost cutting in Medicare has made hospitals desperate for funds. Various laws has hampered the hospitals from making profits, and hospitals are getting predatorily aggressive to make up for the losses. This will only get worse with the opening of Boutique or specialized Hospitals. Hospitals are now going under in many States. Bureaucrats who don't understand medicine make financial decisions and don't care about quality. This has destroyed the hospitals ability to function. “The Politicals” do not understand that the reason why some services are less expensive in some hospitals ,is due to the low quality services they provide. Unfortunately the Lower Cost poor quality is used as a guideline in billing. This is the same for HMO's. Hillary destroyed the medical industry and could be a key player responsible for a sharp rise in Nosocomial infection rates (due to hospital cuts in spending). She forced the hospitals into a cost cutting binge with her threats of nationalize health care. The hospitals downsized on staff who do duplicate services (this was understandable), the problem is that these people were there initially to double check for errors. When Healthcare workers are forced to work with less than adequate staffing, more mistakes are made.
We see MD’s-DO’s and even ND’s venturing out to create specialized Boutique Hospitals taking the best hospital profitable testing with them. This leaves the Public Hospitals relying on subsidized healthcare.
The Birth of the “For Profit” Hospital Monster is a direct result of Poor CEO-COO management and the Hilary Blunder.
My Final Answer
I agree that inflation of medical costs is the big problem. I have always felt this was a technology issue. Americans always want the best and the top of the line, but don't understand that cutting edge technology always costs much more than lower-tech approaches. Not everyone with chest pain needs a cardiac cath, and not everyone with a headache needs an MRI, but this is where we are. If people would be happy with meatloaf instead of filet mignon, costs could be controlled.