Democrats want to bring everyone into the system; Republicans think people demand too much treatment.
'HillaryCare Redux," sneered Rudy Giuliani's campaign on the day Hillary Clinton announced her new proposal for universal healthcare. "It's enough to make you 'Sicko.' " Fred Thompson's folks, working off the same playbook, said it's "enough to make you sick." Mitt Romney offended St. Vincent's Hospital in New York by using its building as a backdrop for his own hasty assault on the plan he probably hadn't read.Smears without substance are bad enough, but smears without substance that use bad puns merit a special circle in hell. So all in all, the Republican respondents didn't exactly cover themselves in glory here.
But now that the major candidates from both parties have offered plans for reforming American healthcare (the exception being Thompson, whose campaign has elevated a bored disengagement with substantive policy matters into a sort of avant-garde political aesthetic), it's worth taking a more sober look at what the candidates are promising to do about the issue Americans rank as their most important domestic priority.
The task is eased by the fact that the two political parties have largely converged on distinct diagnoses of what the system's problems are and what reform would look like.
The plans offered by the Democrats differ in details and ambition but diagnose the problem in basically the same way: Not enough people have health insurance, and the fragmented, patchwork nature of our system for obtaining coverage leaves us to the not-so-tender mercies of insurers that have their best interests, rather than ours, foremost in mind. The reforms flow naturally from that point. Clinton and John Edwards both propose an "individual mandate" to ensure universal coverage.
Under their systems, every American would have to purchase health coverage, and a system of subsidies and tax credits would be constructed to make sure coverage was affordable. Barack Obama would channel healthcare through employers to the employed, but he doesn't build in mechanisms to ensure that adults outside the labor force are covered.
All three engage in substantial reform of the insurance market aimed at broadening the risk pool. If their plans are adopted, insurers would no longer be able to refuse coverage (or charge higher rates) based on preexisting conditions. They would have to cover anyone who seeks coverage and charge them a price based on the average member of the community, not on a complex underwriting formula that seeks to determine future health costs by running opaque equations that can disqualify someone for coverage because they used allergy medicine in the past.
Insurers no longer would be able to profit by separating out the young and healthy from the old and sick, thus sectioning the market into those worth insuring and those not worth insuring.
The hope is that these changes would force insurers to compete based on the cost and quality of the policies they provide rather than who has the best underwriting team.If that hope falls flat, however, all of the Democrats offer up another option: a government-run insurance program modeled on, but distinct from, Medicare. In health policy circles, one of the primary debates is how much distortion the profit incentive inserts into health insurance. "How can my insurer best pay for my medical care?" is a different question from "How can my insurer best profit off of my need for medical care?"
The Democratic plans essentially let the market decide. There will be a public insurer for those who want it, and if people feel that it provides better service, the private insurers will either have to adopt similar techniques or go out of business.....
'HillaryCare Redux," sneered Rudy Giuliani's campaign on the day Hillary Clinton announced her new proposal for universal healthcare. "It's enough to make you 'Sicko.' " Fred Thompson's folks, working off the same playbook, said it's "enough to make you sick." Mitt Romney offended St. Vincent's Hospital in New York by using its building as a backdrop for his own hasty assault on the plan he probably hadn't read.Smears without substance are bad enough, but smears without substance that use bad puns merit a special circle in hell. So all in all, the Republican respondents didn't exactly cover themselves in glory here.
But now that the major candidates from both parties have offered plans for reforming American healthcare (the exception being Thompson, whose campaign has elevated a bored disengagement with substantive policy matters into a sort of avant-garde political aesthetic), it's worth taking a more sober look at what the candidates are promising to do about the issue Americans rank as their most important domestic priority.
The task is eased by the fact that the two political parties have largely converged on distinct diagnoses of what the system's problems are and what reform would look like.
The plans offered by the Democrats differ in details and ambition but diagnose the problem in basically the same way: Not enough people have health insurance, and the fragmented, patchwork nature of our system for obtaining coverage leaves us to the not-so-tender mercies of insurers that have their best interests, rather than ours, foremost in mind. The reforms flow naturally from that point. Clinton and John Edwards both propose an "individual mandate" to ensure universal coverage.
Under their systems, every American would have to purchase health coverage, and a system of subsidies and tax credits would be constructed to make sure coverage was affordable. Barack Obama would channel healthcare through employers to the employed, but he doesn't build in mechanisms to ensure that adults outside the labor force are covered.
All three engage in substantial reform of the insurance market aimed at broadening the risk pool. If their plans are adopted, insurers would no longer be able to refuse coverage (or charge higher rates) based on preexisting conditions. They would have to cover anyone who seeks coverage and charge them a price based on the average member of the community, not on a complex underwriting formula that seeks to determine future health costs by running opaque equations that can disqualify someone for coverage because they used allergy medicine in the past.
Insurers no longer would be able to profit by separating out the young and healthy from the old and sick, thus sectioning the market into those worth insuring and those not worth insuring.
The hope is that these changes would force insurers to compete based on the cost and quality of the policies they provide rather than who has the best underwriting team.If that hope falls flat, however, all of the Democrats offer up another option: a government-run insurance program modeled on, but distinct from, Medicare. In health policy circles, one of the primary debates is how much distortion the profit incentive inserts into health insurance. "How can my insurer best pay for my medical care?" is a different question from "How can my insurer best profit off of my need for medical care?"
The Democratic plans essentially let the market decide. There will be a public insurer for those who want it, and if people feel that it provides better service, the private insurers will either have to adopt similar techniques or go out of business.....
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