| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
13 Jun 2005 04:28:22 AM |
| Object: |
OT: One Nation, Uninsured |
One Nation, Uninsured
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/opinion/13krugman.html
By PAUL KRUGMAN
With the cost of health care exploding and the number of uninsured
growing, the time will soon be ripe for another try at universal
coverage.
Paul Krugman
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/2275877b0d3f639a
http://snipurl.com/7h5c
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: One Nation, Uninsured |
18 Jun 2005 09:43:11 AM |
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On 13 Jun 2005 02:28:22 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
One Nation, Uninsured
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/opinion/13krugman.html
By PAUL KRUGMAN
With the cost of health care exploding and the number of uninsured
growing, the time will soon be ripe for another try at universal
coverage.
One Nation, Uninsured
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 13 June 2005
Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system.
Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno's book "One
Nation, Uninsured" tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans
favored national health insurance. If Truman had succeeded, universal
coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an
accepted part of the social contract.
But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American
Medical Association and Southern politicians who feared that national
insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed.
Sixty years later, the patchwork system that evolved in the
absence of national health insurance is unraveling. The cost of health
care is exploding, the number of uninsured is growing, and
corporations that still provide employee coverage are groaning under
the strain.
So the time will soon be ripe for another try at universal
coverage. Public opinion is already favorable: a 2003 Pew poll found
that 72 percent of Americans favored government-guaranteed health
insurance for all.
But special interests will, once again, stand in the way. And the
big debate among would-be reformers is how to deal with those
interests, especially the insurance companies. These companies played
a secondary role in Truman's failure but have since become a seemingly
invincible lobby.
Let's ignore those who believe that private medical accounts -
basically tax shelters for the healthy and wealthy - can solve our
health care problems through the magic of the marketplace. The
intellectually serious debate is between those who believe that the
government should simply provide basic health insurance for everyone
and those proposing a more complex, indirect approach that preserves a
central role for private health insurance companies.
A system in which the government provides universal health
insurance is often referred to as "single payer," but I like Ted
Kennedy's slogan "Medicare for all." It reminds voters that America
already has a highly successful, popular single-payer program, albeit
only for the elderly. It shows that we're talking about government
insurance, not government-provided health care. And it makes it clear
that like Medicare (but unlike Canada's system), a U.S. national
health insurance system would allow individuals with the means and
inclination to buy their own medical care.
The great advantage of universal, government-provided health
insurance is lower costs. Canada's government-run insurance system has
much less bureaucracy and much lower administrative costs than our
largely private system. Medicare has much lower administrative costs
than private insurance. The reason is that single-payer systems don't
devote large resources to screening out high-risk clients or charging
them higher fees. The savings from a single-payer system would
probably exceed $200 billion a year, far more than the cost of
covering all of those now uninsured.
Nonetheless, most reform proposals out there - even proposals from
liberal groups like the Century Foundation and the Center for American
Progress - reject a simple single-payer approach. Instead, they call
for some combination of mandates and subsidies to help everyone buy
insurance from private insurers.
Some people, not all of them right-wingers, fear that a
single-payer system would hurt innovation. But the main reason these
proposals give private insurers a big role is the belief that the
insurers must be appeased.
That belief is rooted in recent history. Bill Clinton's health
care plan failed in large part because of a dishonest but devastating
lobbying and advertising campaign financed by the health insurance
industry - remember Harry and Louise? And the lesson many people took
from that defeat is that any future health care proposal must buy off
the insurance lobby.
But I think that's the wrong lesson. The Clinton plan actually
preserved a big role for private insurers; the industry attacked it
all the same. And the plan's complexity, which was largely a result of
attempts to placate interest groups, made it hard to sell to the
public. So I would argue that good economics is also good politics:
reformers will do best with a straightforward single-payer plan, which
offers maximum savings and, unlike the Clinton plan, can easily be
explained.
We need to do this one right. If reform fails again, we'll be on
the way to a radically unequal society, in which all but the most
affluent Americans face the constant risk of financial ruin and even
premature death because they can't pay their medical bills.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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