Sen. Clinton Unveils Health Care Plan

You can read the details here.

Quickly:

A smorgasbord on the insurance side:

* Leave current insurance plans alone -- but allow people in them to opt out for the other altnernatives in the plan;

* Give people the choice of joining one of the private insurance plans that provide insurance to federal employees OR join a "Medicare-like" plan;

* Insist that all plans cover dental, mental health services and not be allowed to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions or who are known health risks;

* Require individuals to buy insurance.

Big changes on the tax side:

* Begin taxing employer-provided "generous" health insurance plans if they go to families earning over $250,000 a year;

* Dun employers who don't provide health insurance to their employees;

* Offer a tax credit to low- and moderate-income people to help pay for their portion of health insurance; and

* Give small businesses a tax credit for offering health plans.

The Clinton campaign also says the increased taxes, less the new tax credits, will more than offset the increased costs of insuring 47 million uninsured Americans. How? By eliminating waste and unnecessary expenditures. Presumably, that's where cost-effectiveness research, subsidies for electronic medical records and better preventive medicine, addressed elsewhere in her plan, comes in.

My quick reaction? This is classic Clintonian politics. She's drawn from elements of every think tank proposal and all the other candidates' plans. She even opted for one element of President Bush's non-starter program. He began the year by calling for the end of the income tax exclusion for health care benefits, which Sen. Clinton would impose only on the well-off.

Her plan's name says it all. American Health Choices Plan is based on the most positively poll-tested concept in health care: freedom of choice.

While there is a lot to like in her approach, discussing it requires mastering a lot of concepts. And it leaves her opponents plenty of opportunities for attack. I'm sure we'll be hearing from the special interests who are clear losers under this approach: companies that don't provide insurance; well-off people with excellent health coverage; and the rich.

The biggest surprise? She didn't aim many barbs at the insurance industry, which helped sink her husband's plan with its Harry and Loise ads. Health insurers are given a major opportunity to insure the uninsured through an expanded FEHPP (Federal Employees Health Provider Plans). It will be interesting to see if that is enough to get them to call off the dogs on what has to be the bottom line of any universal plan: the end of adverse selection.

Clinton, like most Democrats, is calling for a tough new federal regulatory scheme on insurers so they can't discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions or known health risks. Any plan that keeps the insurance industry in the game (i.e., anything other than a single-payer plan) must enact such a law. If the Democrats were smart, they'd start pushing for that single element now as a way to educate both the national press and the public about what is really at stake.

Posted by gooznews at September 17, 2007 03:58 PM