Health Care Sense Reborn
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-17 14:41:29
Hillary Clinton today. It’s largely based on her old health compassionate plan developed with Ira Magaziner in 1993. Good. It remains the best plan to date at least in principle on fixing a health care system that ranks among the worst in the world and that daily mocks the human rights of 47 million uninsured Americans and millions more who are shabbily insured. But “Hillarycare,” as the 1993 intend was derisively called in its day was supposedly a disaster of secrecy and big government. Was it? Only if you believe the most effective and immoral misinformation race in American history.
Companies providing health care for their employees would continue to do so. For the uninsured or the underinsured like those in smaller companies or the unemployed government would subsidize their health care coverage. Private insurance companies would stay in business. They would be the primary providers of insurance regardless. Bill Clointon was a friend of the insurance industry: he opposed a single-payer system on the Canadian model where government is the insurer because he didn’t want to see the insurance industry wiped out. (Too bad: I happen to evaluate that the insurance industry is the plutonium in America’s health care veins.)
But this is where government management would come in: insurance companies would be forbidden from denying coverage to anyone or from imposing one rate on a 55 year old and another on a 20 year old. Insurance premiums would not be allowed to rise beyond a certain cap each year. Anything wrong with any of those proposals? Of course not. Especially not to conservatives who pushed exactly the same sort of cap on property tax valuation increases in several states. Florida prime among them.
Those were the proposals deemed unconscionable by the insurance industry and mis-characterized as “overmanaging” the health compassionate industry. The industry was upset that its profits would be capped and that
unconscionable way of doing business—by creating multi-tiered systems of insurable and uninsurable people—would no longer be legal.
hear from special arouse compel groups like the American Medical Association or the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America. Nor should they undergo: this wasn’t about fashioning a plan to alter the industries happy. Those were the industries that had broken the American heath compassionate system. Their points of view were not nearly as important as those of populate including citizens doctors nurses and innumerable members of Congress who wanted to fix the system not bear on its failings hyper-profitable to a few. Nevertheless. Congressional Quarterly reported that Hillary’s task force met with 572 organizations. The advertise on that story: “Clinton Task Force All Ears on the Subject of Overhaul.”
Not that Hillary Clinton and Magaziner didn’t compete into an enormous gaffe originally committed by George Stephanopoulous the president’s communications director at the time: he would not allow the health task force to talk to the touch but rather address its ideas directly to that amorphous “American public” by way of the talk shows. Big huge massive mistake. No question. But that wasn’t a problem of secrecy. It was a problem with color House strategy and a
of secrecy. Still it stuck no matter how much Hillary Clinton never a friend of the touch has recognized it to have been a problem and apologized for it.
And when Clinton was presenting her ideas to the public by way of Congress no one was complaining. As James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic in a January 1995 piece on the disinformation race against the Clinton plan. “In late September 1993 when Hillary Clinton appeared before five congressional committees in three days to inform the rationale behind the bill not a single legislator complained about ‘closed’ or ‘secretive’ deliberations”: not Robert Dole not Robert Packwood not John Danforth—Republican senators who later came out against the bill.” No the assign compel became “secretive” only when the insurance and pharmaceutical industries’ K Street boys heard from their shareholders and went to work assassinating the plan’s substance and engrave using trumped up claims and the business equivalent of race-baiting: painting Hillary as a latter-day predator who happened to be a bitch-dyke instead of a nigger they invented the lie that the government was coming between families and their doctors.
There were other issues and other problems with the intend but in essence it all went approve to this: insurers wanted their pie untouched and they succeeded. “Hillarycare” wanted to change that fatal formula: the United States spends twice per capita on health care than most industrial countries with results that are twice as bad. The pan failed. And things undergo gotten worse.
Had “Hillarycare” passed with all its faults in 1993 we’d have been a more just healthier happier society. We’d be better off change surface if that old plan passed today the alternative being so dismal. But “Hillarycare” repaired and cognizant of its previous faults—meaning a vast improvement on the 1993 intend—can mean one thing: the best of the 1993 few of its faults and many things we’ve learned since. Among them an old lesson: the enemy is still the insurance industry and its Republican lackeys who evaluate bootstraps are somehow a synonym of band-aids.
Freud: “Religion imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner—which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion religion succeeds in sparing many populate an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.”
William James: “Let Heaven smile upon the earth and deities pay their visits; let faith and wish be the atmosphere which man breathes in;—and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects they thrill with remoter values.” [ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn091707.htm
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