How bad is it?.....Let's count the ways

[sirs]

HillaryCare II: The devilish details
By Michael Cannon and Michael Tanner

Once again, Hillary Clinton has unveiled a massive new plan to reform America's health care system. Once again, her plan calls for higher taxes ? it will cost more than $110 billion per year ? lower wages, fewer jobs, less choice and worse health care. Sen. Clinton appears to have learned little since the public rejected her last attempt to overhaul the U.S. health care system in 1994.

The centerpiece of HillaryCare II is an individual mandate, which is a fancy way of saying she would force everyone to buy health insurance or face penalties. But where the government mandates that you buy insurance, the government defines what "insurance" is. That means the government will be designing your health coverage, with the help of legions of special interests with more political influence than you have.

If you are among the 85 percent of Americans who currently have health insurance ? and are happy with it ? but it doesn't meet Hillary's definition of proper insurance, too bad. You'll have to shell out for the insurance she says you should have. A similar mandate in Massachusetts has already led to a requirement that all insurance cover prescription drugs and no plan have a deductible of more than $2,000. Sen. Clinton may say that you can keep the coverage you have now, but if you read the fine print, she doesn't really mean it.

Moreover, an individual mandate will require a huge new government bureaucracy to track and monitor compliance. Think of how hard it will be to track down everyone who moves or changes jobs, let alone every undocumented alien or homeless person, to make sure he has the proper insurance and punish him if he doesn't.

And it's not just individuals who would feel the heavy hand of government. Sen. Clinton would also impose a "play or pay" mandate on American businesses, requiring them to provide workers with health insurance or pay an additional tax. That would simply increase the cost of hiring workers, meaning less entrepreneurship, and fewer new hires. Some employers would even have to lay off current employees or reduce wages.

Clinton would require insurance companies to accept all applicants regardless of their health, and charge all applicants the same premiums. That sounds compassionate until you realize that it would dramatically increase premiums for younger workers, who generally earn less, in order to reduce premiums for older workers, who earn more. That turns Robin Hood on his head. It also would increase premiums for those who practice healthy lifestyles to subsidize the reckless.

This time around, Clinton dropped her bid to herd all Americans into regional health insurance "purchasing pools," where Washington dictates the price and content of your health coverage. Some consumers actually could stay with their current insurers, but Washington would still retain all the same powers as under her old plan.

And if you don't like those options? Consumers could choose to join a national purchasing pool where ? you guessed it ? Washington again calls all the shots. That national pool would be the Federal Employees' Health Benefits Program, meaning that Clinton merely adopted an idea that has already been trotted out by John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Wesley Clark and Howard Dean and host of other failed Democratic candidates.

And finally, Sen. Clinton would dramatically expand existing government health care programs. She would open Medicare to the near elderly, a program that is already $50 trillion in the red according to its nonpartisan trustees. This seems about as wise as to adding a few more passengers to the Titanic. And she would expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program to provide taxpayer-funded health insurance for middle-class families earning more than $83,000 per year.

On the campaign trail, Sen. Clinton boasts that she bears the scars of her first effort to reform health care. If she is successful this time around, the scars will be ours.


The Devilsh Details

[sirs]

HillaryCare still is a lousy prescription
The reality pretty much will be the opposite of what the presidential candidate promises.
An Orange County Register editorial

HillaryCare is back with a promise to make health care more affordable, more available and with more choices for everyone. But if Sen. Hillary Clinton's health care program financed with $110 billion a year in new taxes becomes law, health care will be substantially more expensive, health insurance will be much less available, and Americans will have far fewer choices. One more thing: The nation will be ever closer to complete government-run health care. So much for promises.

Sen. Clinton would require every person to pay for health care, or receive it at someone else's expense.
She would require employers to provide insurance or pay into a fund.
She would require insurers to sell coverage at the same price, whether buyers are in perfect health or at death's door.
Mrs. Clinton would subsidize some insurance premiums with tax credits. And she would dramatically expand taxpaid government-provided health care into the middle class, offering "a public plan option similar to Medicare."

Sen. Clinton's solutions would worsen everything she claims to fix and move the nation away from genuine market-based options that drive down prices. As the libertarian Cato Institute's director of health and welfare studies, Michael D. Tanner, observed: "Hillary Clinton clearly trusts big government more than she trusts the free market and the American people."

Requiring individuals to purchase health insurance would require a massive, costly government bureaucracy to enforce compliance. Even then it's certain to fall short of its universal goal. In California, where all motorists are required to have auto insurance, about 25 percent don't. Mandating behavior doesn't guarantee it.

Requiring employers to provide health insurance or pay a new tax into a fund would inflate business costs, resulting in fewer workers hired and more laid off. Businesses with fewer than 10 employees, exempt under Sen. Clinton's plan, would be discouraged from expanding payrolls rather than trigger insurance-or-tax mandates.

Requiring insurers to sell coverage at one price irrespective of health risks would mean premiums would soar to cover actuarial risks posed by those in bad health. Such a mandate would impose on private insurers a subsidy to cover the gravely ill by overcharging the relatively well. It's also likely to drive providers out of the market, and the void would be filled by government plans. Could that be the motive?

Sen. Clinton's proposed expansion of the federal State Children's Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to include middle-class families is another step closer to socialized medicine. Private clients would migrate to government-funded coverage. What family would pay private premiums, bound to increase thanks to Sen. Clinton's mandate on insurers, when a "free" government program is available at someone else's expense?

Sen. Clinton's plan "would mean higher taxes, lost jobs, less patient choice and poorer quality health care," Mr. Tanner said.


An Alterior Motive, perhaps?

[sirs]

Bend over for Nurse Hillary
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist

Our theme for today comes from George W Bush: ?Freedom is the desire of every human heart.?
When the president uses the phrase, he?s invariably applying it to various benighted parts of the Muslim world. There would seem to be quite a bit of evidence to suggest that freedom is not the principal desire of every human heart in, say, Gaza or Waziristan. But why start there? If you look in, say, Brussels or London or New Orleans, do you come away with the overwhelming impression that ?freedom is the desire of every human heart?? A year ago, I wrote that ?the story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ?security,? large numbers of people vote to dump freedom ? the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff.?

Last week freedom took another hit. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her new health care plan. Unlike her old health care plan, which took longer to read than most cancers take to kill you, this one?s instant and painless ? just a spoonful of government sugar to help the medicine go down. From now on, everyone in America will have to have health insurance.
Hooray!

And, if you don?t, it will be illegal for you to hold a job.

Er, hang on, where?s that in the Constitution? It?s perfectly fine to employ legions of the undocumented from Mexico, but if you employ a fit 26-year-old American with no health insurance either you or he or both of you will be breaking the law?

That?s a major surrender of freedom from the citizen to the state. ?So what?? says the caring crowd. ?We?ve got to do something about those 40 million uninsured! Whoops, I mean 45 million uninsured. Maybe 50 by now.? This figure is always spoken of as if it?s a club you can join but never leave: The very first Uninsured-American was ol? Bud who came back from the Spanish-American War and found he was uninsured and so was first on the list, and then Mabel put her back out doing the Black Bottom at a tea dance in 1926 and she became the second, and so on and so forth, until things really began to snowball under the Bush junta. And, by the time you read this, the number of uninsured may be up to 75 million.

Nobody really knows how many ?uninsured? there are: Two different Census Bureau surveys conducted in the same year identify the number of uninsured as A) 45 million or B) 19 million. The first figure is the one you hear about, the second figure apparently entered the Witness Protection Program. Of those 45 million ?uninsured Americans,? the Census Bureau itself says over 9 million aren?t Americans at all, but foreign nationals. They have various health care back-ups: If you?re an uninsured Canadian in Detroit, and you get an expensive chronic disease, you can go over the border to Windsor, Ontario, and re-embrace the delights of socialized health care; if you?re an uninsured Uzbek, it might be more complicated. Of the remaining 36 million, a 2005 Actuarial Research analysis for the Department of Health and Human Services says that another 9 million did, in fact, have health coverage through Medicare.

Where are we now? 27 million? So who are they? Bud and Mabel and a vast mountain of emaciated husks of twisted limbs and shriveled skin covered in boils and pustules? No, it?s a rotating population:
- People who had health insurance but changed jobs,
- people who are between jobs,
- young guys who feel they?re fit and healthy and at this stage of their lives would rather put a monthly health-insurance tab towards buying a home or starting a business or
- blowing it on booze ?n? chicks.

That last category is the one to watch: Americans 18-34 account for 18 million of the army of the ?uninsured.? Look, there?s a 22-year-old, and he doesn?t have health insurance! Oh, the horror and the shame! What an indictment of America!

Well, he doesn?t have life insurance, either, or homeowner?s insurance. He lives a life blessedly free of the tedious bet-hedging paperwork of middle age. He?s 22, and he thinks he?s immortal ? and any day now Hillary will propose garnishing his wages for her new affordable mandatory life-insurance plan.

So, out of 45 million uninsured Americans, 9 million aren?t American, 9 million are insured, 18 million are young and healthy. And the rest of these poor helpless waifs trapped in Uninsured Hell waiting for Hillary to rescue them are, in fact, wealthier than the general population. According to the Census Bureau?s August 2006 report on ?Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage,? 37 percent of those without health insurance ? that?s 17 million people ? come from households earning more than $50,000. Nineteen percent ? 8.7 million people ? of those downtrodden paupers crushed by the brutal inequities of capitalism come from households earning more than $75,000.

In other words, if they fall off the roof, they can write a check. Indeed, the so-called ?explosion? of the uninsured has been driven entirely by wealthy households opting out of health insurance. In the decade after 1995 ? i.e., since the last round of coercive health reform ? the proportion of the uninsured earning less than $25,000 has fallen by 20 percent, and the proportion earning more than 75 grand has increased by 155 percent. The story of the past decade is that the poor are getting sucked into the maw of ?coverage,? and the rich are fleeing it. And, given that the cost of health ?insurance? bears increasingly little relationship to either the cost of treatment or the actuarial reality of you ever getting any particular illness, it?s entirely rational to say: ?You know what? I?ll worry about that when it happens. In the meantime, I want to start a business and send my kid to school.? Freedom is the desire of my human heart even if my arteries get all clogged and hardened.

I was glad, at the end of Hillary Health Week, to see that my radio pal Laura Ingraham?s excellent new book, ?Power To The People,? has shot into the New York Times bestseller list at No. 1. It takes a fraudulent leftist catchphrase (the only thing you can guarantee about a ?people?s republic? is that the people are the least of it) and returns it to those who mean it ? to those who believe in a nation of free citizens exercising individual liberty to make responsible choices.

Do you remember the so-called ?government surplus? of a few years ago? Bill Clinton gave a speech in which he said, yes, sure, he could return the money to taxpayers but that we ?might not spend it the right way.? The American political class has decided that they know better than you the ?right way? to make health care decisions. Oh, don?t worry, you?re still fully competent to make decisions on what car you drive and what movie you want to rent at Blockbuster.
For the moment.

But when it comes to the grownup stuff, best to leave that to Nurse Hillary.


Hillary (& Edwards) know better than you....now bend over

[Christians4LessGvt]

[Brassmask]

Personally, I hate Hillary.  And I think her health care ideas will in some as-yet-unnoticed way will widely benefit the insurance and big pharma corporations.

What we need is a candidate who says that he or she will put the insurance companies out of business for good.

You guys are whining about having to pay for someone else's insurance or health care but what you don't realize is that you pay for those things ALREADY.  Health care wouldn't be so god damned expensive if the doctors, pharmas and every damn other aspect didn't raise prices to cover the uninsured and unable to pay.   They raise the prices in order to cover the lost pay.

I don't understand the disconnect between being rabidly FOR giving Bush half a million a minute to keep troops in Iraq for perpetuity to be nothing more than targets but being against giving Hillary (or whoever) $110 billion a year to pay for Americans to be healthier and happier and more productive.

What's worse, you can't even say "But for the grace of God, go I".  While most of us have insurance or can afford to go to the doctor, I can easily envision something going horribly wrong in my own life and waking up very quickly to find myself needing assistance with health care costs.

[BT]

The problem with Hillary Care is it is half assed.

Fund healthcare at the state level with sales tax.

Everybody pays, everybody is covered.

[sirs]

I don't understand the disconnect between being rabidly FOR giving Bush half a million a minute to keep troops in Iraq for perpetuity to be nothing more than targets but being against giving Hillary (or whoever) $110 billion a year to pay for Americans to be healthier and happier and more productive.

Because A) no one is preventing anyone from trying to live healther & happier, B) there is no right to another person's services, payed for by someone else, and C) your OPINION on the disconnect is duely noted....and wrong as ususal

What's worse, you can't even say "But for the grace of God, go I". 

Actually, what's really worse is the idea that the Fed, the same one that runs the post-office, (where I'm line for upwards of half an hour to 45minutes at times), the same one that was behind the Katrina clean-up, the same one that is bloated with inefficient bureacracy at every level, where both Medicare & SS are slowly bleeding to death from a budgeting standpoint, is what you folks are advocating take care of our health??  It's down right scary.  Here in CA, there's been a mandate for years that everyone have car insurance.  Last I checked there was somewhere upwards of close to 20% still uninsured.  And that's just at the state level.     

You want to pay for Soros', Limbaugh's, and Gates' healthcare so bad, YOU go right ahead