John Edwards' Universal Healthcare plan

10 thoughts on “John Edwards’ Universal Healthcare plan”

1. This isn’t the place to discuss health care in depth, because most of the posters are interested in politics, not issues, far as I can tell after reading posts here for about a year.

   Suffice it to say that Edwards ruins his credibility in several ways. First, his claims about the quality of health care in the U.S. are as misleading as a wealthy malpractice trial lawyer can make them.

   Then his proposal is not his. It’s Hillary’s, slightly rewritten. And it’s written to give something to everyone who has a hand out for entitlements and jobs.

   Edwards, Clinton and Obama are all socialists and want to bring socialized medicine to the U.S., which may, I’m afraid, be ready to bite.

   With Clinton so far in the lead in the race for the White House, what Edwards proposes about health care really doesn’t matter.

   The socialized health care mamma is Hillary, and nobody can out nationalize health care better than the woman who declared:

   “I’ll take their profits.

   Edwards just cannot out bribe the American voter when he’s up against Hillary and Bill (“two for one.”).

   Note that the proposal is published as a pdf file, which makes it harder for bloggers to “Fisk” the proposal by shooting it down, line by line. It will be done, but not here.

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   1. is just what dems love to do…they’ll promise to out tax and then out spend the other on any number of redistribution schemes they will advance over the course of the next two years. It’ll be a veritable cash give away for the American voter.

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      1. The Clinton health plan lost because it was obvious that the left could use it to buy votes by adding benefits before every election.

         Voters understood that if the Defense Dept. couldn’t arm our troops effectively or buy from defense contractors without waste and scandal, no health care bureaucracy couild manage the Rube Goldberg scheme Hillary and her gang of 500 dreamed up behind closed doors.

         The public didn’t trust Hillary to make good health insurance decisions for them, and they sure as heck didn’t trust some future politico, say, a Tom DeLay, to, either.

         What Hillary I and Hillary II have in common is Medicaid for all of us.

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         1. …marginal care for all at unimaginable costs and ineffective oversight! Wow! Where do I sing up, oh wait, dems will do that for us as they reach into our pockets to grab the dough needed to run this system!  Wonderful…one more step toward a utopic socialist society!

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   2. Your first paragraph is probably right. Although, you trying to spin this as some sort of Hillary bashing was not why I posted it.

      You and others, myself included, have been wondering where debate can be had. I thought, when I posted the link, that I should say something along the lines of “serious replies only please,” or “Serious debate only, no kneejerk responses,” but I guess that is not possible.

      Did you or eddys even read it before vomiting the Universal healthcare = Godless Communism – RUN FOR YOUR LIVES AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

      By the way, Hillary has not published a plan as part of her campaign as far as I know, so no, they are not the same.

       

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      1. I think the country is much better primed for Clinton’s socialized health care than it was in 1994.

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   3. We pay involuntary insurance premiums to monolithic bureaucracies known as insurance companies and HMOs, plus taxes to care for those who can’t afford their own health insurance and whose lousy jobs don’t provide for it. Only the very wealthy can afford to choose whether to be insured; for the rest of us premiums are as inevitable as death and taxes.

      Maybe it’s better that there are some insurance companies and HMOs to compete rather than have Uncle Sam be the only player in town. But fretting about “socialized medicine” like it isn’t already reality is knee-jerk and not insightful.

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      1. We do not have a health care system.

         We have health insurance markets all over the country. Each metro area is a different area, and some states are contained markets.

         Medicare, Medicaid, VA health care, military health care, mental health services provided by states and SCHIP are all forms of socialized medicine. The government pays for services provided by government and private providers.

         Private insurers compete for the business of people who don’t qualify for the government programs. You can’t call what they offer “socialized health care,” because the government is not the payer.

         Just because some of us post in one liners and single graph responses doesn’t mean we’re talking off the tops of our heads. We’ve put a lot of thought and study into the topic, and we have lots of experience with the markets.

         One of the frustrations is that most people who discuss health insurance either know some small aspect of medicine or health care or health insurance, or they know a bit about markets and economics. Few have experience with all of the above plus political analysis. You can see that in Edwards’ proposal and all the blogs and letters to the editor that cheer him on.

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   4. Edwards is very careful to cite only the most reliable of sources throughout his diagnosis of the quality of healthcare in this country.  The Census Bureau, the CDC, the NIM, and the OECD figure prominently; newspaper research and non-partisan foundations round out the citations.

      As a nation dealing with healthcare, we really aren’t living up to our reputation as the best that the world has to offer.  We’re paying more, getting less, and it turns out we don’t even have as high a doctor-to-patient ratio as the rest of the industrialized world – something often cited by critics of nationalized healthcare plans which is apparently just plain untrue.

      I do agree that it looks a lot like “Hillarycare”; what Hillary started as a simple single-payer plan evolved into the beast that everyone ridiculed at the time because she let everyone get involved in formulating it.  The difference between “Hillarycare” and now is that you’re right – the U.S. might be willing to accept it now.  Now the Canadians and the British systems don’t look as foolish as they did back then.  Now there’s a lot of data showing our country slipping in medical care ratings.  Now our premiums have continued to go through the roof for another decade with no visible additional benefits, and ever more visible limits and restrictions and co-pays and deductibles.  And now it’s harder than ever to get coverage, and harder than ever to get that coverage to pay out.  HRC might have looked mad back then, or maybe it was just the “out to get the Clintons” mentality pervading the air at the time, but right now she’s got a lot more solid ground beneath her healthcare past than she used to.

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2. My first thought is – it’s too complex.

   But my fully considered thought is – it’s probably about what we can reasonably expect all involved parties to swallow in one chunk.  It addresses the concern of suddenly putting hundreds of thousands of health insurance workers out of business by giving them a seat at the competitive table.  It throws a bone to the Republicans by supporting health care tax credits, but it resolves the problem of poor people who don’t benefit from tax credits by expanding coverage near poverty level.  It resolves some of the more commonly discussed issues like electronic record-checking during hospital pharmaceutical distribution, and acknowledges that a single-payer system might evolve if insurers consistently lose out to the available government plan.

   In short, it sounds like Edwards took some time to listen to all sides and came up with a plan that would pass the usual Senate standards for compromise.

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