The next president of the United States will be one of two people: Hillary Clinton or Rudolph Giuliani. Obviously, the former wants to impose government-run health care on the country, so the latter’s new health care proposal probably constitutes our only hope of avoiding socialized medicine. Here are the main things “Hizzoner’s” plan would accomplish:
Provide an income exclusion of up to $15,000 for those without employer coverage.
Provide a health insurance credit to low-income Americans that could be coupled with other revenue sources, such as Medicaid and employer contributions.
Reform the medical liability legal system without limiting compensation for real economic loss.
Eliminate state mandates that limit coverage options, increase costs, and prevent individuals from purchasing insurance.
Streamline the FDA process so that government regulation does not delay new cures or needlessly cost lives.
Expand access to health savings accounts by simplifying current rules and regulations.
As David Hogberg points out, the Giuliani plan isn’t perfect. It does however, emphasize the free market, a feature that will serve the health care system and its patients well. And it is vastly superior to the statist solutions favored by his likely opponent in next year’s election.
Rudycare, in other words, is right for American health care and represents our only real hope of avoiding Hillarycare.
Comments 2
RudyCare is a pipe dream. By his own vague estimates the lag time between his proposal’s being enacted and the insurance companies response by lowering individual care is going to be very large, and he doesn’t discuss anything about covering the gap. Furthermore his claim that the problem is company’s propensity to over-insure is laughable. In the age where companies are being forced to pass cost increases on to employees rather than always absorb them, and this after they’ve chosen a reasonable though barebones health insurance plan, it is ludicrous to claim the problem is over-insurance.
I hated HillaryCare in 1994. Having now gone through trying to get a terminally ill parent health coverage and dealing with that process I’m very for the concept of a single payer system (although not just any old one that comes along). The current one, where healthy people pay in and sick people are dumped, is not benefiting anyone except the health insurance companies.
The free market works well but is not perfect, and it is what has gotten us to the point where we are today. Just closing our eyes and saying “free market will save the day” is the ideological mirror of the socialist ideology of closing our eyes and saying “government will save the day.”
Posted 01 Aug 2007 at 5:09 pm ¶There is essentially nothing in there other than “expand access to health savings accounts” – whatever that means, that is any more than what we currently have. How does it expand the free market to give even more government money to low income people? Or to arbitrarily cap their recovery when physicians are negligent?
Yawn, more of the same promise more at no cost from another big govt. Republican.
Interesting that 14 months before the election according to Catron the libertarian the only two choices are two nanny-state loving, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage types.
Posted 01 Aug 2007 at 6:02 pm ¶Post a Comment