Ramesh explains. But he won’t do it because, despite the fact that it would be vastly superior to the Democrat’s plan in terms of its own stated goals, it doesn’t put the government in control.
4 thoughts on “A Health-Care Plan The President Could Get”
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Ponnuru’s plan would not come close to meeting its goals, much less doing a better job than the Dem plans being discussed. Letting insurers sell across state lines won’t create “a competitive national market” — it will create a race to the bottom, with all insurers operating out of the state or states with the laxest regulations (we see this today with credit cards, which all come from Delaware or South Dakota). Ponnuru acts as if his is a fresh idea, but it’s been extensively discussed for years.
Obama has laid out 8 principles for health care reform:
1. Protect Families’ Financial Health.
2. Make Health Coverage Affordable.
3. Aim for Universality.
4. Provide Portability of Coverage.
5. Guarantee Choice.
6. Invest in Prevention and Wellness.
7. Improve Patient Safety and Quality Care.
8. Maintain Long-Term Fiscal Sustainability.
None of them says anything about government control.
None of them says anything about government control.
Great Zeus’s Beard! Thousand-page laws are not “Hints from Heloise”!
Ponnoru’s plan goes in exactly the wrong direction. The states should be free to try different approaches, because the cost of failure is much less if an idea fails in an individual state than if the the the same idea fails on a national level. If every state has accept the insurance products of every other state, that ability to experiment at the state level goes away.
The great flaw of the plan McCain actually proposed was that the actual proposal wasn’t revenue neutral: the tax credits for health care he was proposing to give out were a lot more than the revenue he would have raised by making employer provided insurance taxable.
The President’s 8 Principles sound fine in the abstract. I doubt the existing kilopage proposals floating about actually create the legal and regulatory infrastruture to accomplish them.
Were they to focus regulatory efforts on #4, NHS budget on #6 (for public health stuff), and research dollars on #7, the others would fall into place.
However, THAT would negate the purpose of these “reform” efforts, which is to insert the federal gov’t into the full extent of the lives of individuals.