One of the best editorials on HillaryCare and our health insurance situation I’ve seen written in a long time, I give you Mark Steyn: (h/t Bookworm Room)
Nobody really knows how many “uninsured” there are: Two different Census Bureau surveys conducted in the same year identify the number of uninsured as A) 45 million or B) 19 million. The first figure is the one you hear about, the second figure apparently entered the Witness Protection Program. Of those 45 million “uninsured Americans,” the Census Bureau itself says over 9 million aren’t Americans at all, but foreign nationals. They have various health care back-ups: If you’re an uninsured Canadian in Detroit, and you get an expensive chronic disease, you can go over the border to Windsor, Ontario, and re-embrace the delights of socialized health care; if you’re an uninsured Uzbek, it might be more complicated. Of the remaining 36 million, a 2005 Actuarial Research analysis for the Department of Health and Human Services says that another 9 million did, in fact, have health coverage through Medicare.
Where are we now? 27 million? So who are they? Bud and Mabel and a vast mountain of emaciated husks of twisted limbs and shriveled skin covered in boils and pustules? No, it’s a rotating population: People who had health insurance but changed jobs, people who are between jobs, young guys who feel they’re fit and healthy and at this stage of their lives would rather put a monthly health-insurance tab towards buying a home or starting a business or blowing it on booze ’n’ chicks.
That last category is the one to watch: Americans 18-34 account for 18 million of the army of the “uninsured.” Look, there’s a 22-year-old, and he doesn’t have health insurance! Oh, the horror and the shame! What an indictment of America!
Well, he doesn’t have life insurance, either, or homeowner’s insurance. He lives a life blessedly free of the tedious bet-hedging paperwork of middle age. He’s 22, and he thinks he’s immortal – and any day now Hillary will propose garnishing his wages for her new affordable mandatory life-insurance plan.
So, out of 45 million uninsured Americans, 9 million aren’t American, 9 million are insured, 18 million are young and healthy. And the rest of these poor helpless waifs trapped in Uninsured Hell waiting for Hillary to rescue them are, in fact, wealthier than the general population. According to the Census Bureau’s August 2006 report on “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage,” 37 percent of those without health insurance – that’s 17 million people – come from households earning more than $50,000. Nineteen percent – 8.7 million people – of those downtrodden paupers crushed by the brutal inequities of capitalism come from households earning more than $75,000.
In every country across this planet socialized health care has failed or is failing miserably. But hey, why not give it one more go right HIllary?
Then we have Dick Morris taking apart HillaryCare bit by bit:
In her program, she speaks of how health care is the right of every "American" — but she has a rather expansive definition of "American." In 2005, Hillary co-sponsored legislation in the United States Senate to offer free health insurance, under the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to the children of illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States for five years. So, those who have dodged the immigration cops for five years successfully would be rewarded not only with legal status and a path to citizenship, but with immediate free health care for their children.
Indeed, when Democrats and liberals speak of the 50,000,000 uninsured Americans, more than one fifth of those are illegal immigrants. Thus, about one in five of the beneficiaries of her program for universal health insurance are illegal aliens. (Illegal immigrants are a disproportionately large segment of the uninsured population because legal immigrants and citizens who live in poverty are eligible for Medicaid, but illegal immigrants are not.)
~~~Hillary speaks of the importance of stopping health insurance companies from raising premiums on those who are sick. But she does not mention the inevitable flip side of her proposal — to raise premiums on those who are well. On the one hand, she would cover all those with chronic conditions with low cost health insurance and, on the other, would stop insurance companies from "cherry picking" healthy and young people for their insurance plans. The net effect would be a major increase in health insurance premiums for the vast majority of Americans.
In effect, her plan would turn "insurance" into "subsidy." The concept of insurance is that one pays a relatively low premium to guard against catastrophic expenses that are outside of our ability to meet financially. But Hillary’s program would really be nothing more than a cash transfer from the healthy to the sick, not an insurance program at all.
Hillary says that her program would provide "universal" coverage for all. In order to achieve universality, one must make the program compulsory. The bulk of the uninsured do not want to have to pay for insurance. They are healthy and don’t want the added burden of health insurance. That is why about half of those who are eligible for free or low cost insurance under the State Child Health Insurance Program have not signed up. Their parents don’t want to.
~~~But the main defect of Hillary’s program is that it leaves out any attempt at cost control. With health care absorbing 16 percent of our economy, Bill Clinton’s warnings of economic disaster if its share of our national income passed 12 percent back in 1993 sound almost quaint today. Cost control is a vital part of any plan for universal coverage. Indeed, without it, extending coverage just offers a blank check to patients and providers which would drive even higher the share of our economy that goes to health care.
It was Hillary herself who explained this concept to Dick in 1993. The reality has not changed. Hillary will be forced to control costs as the implicit and vital element of any health care reform. This control of costs belies her contention that she would leave the health care system untouched except to extend coverage to those who now lack it. Because she would need to limit utilization and lower costs, she would be forced to ration health care and to impose government mandated and controlled managed care on all Americans.
For the first time, the word "no" would come into our system. Do you need open heart surgery? Are you a poor risk because of smoking or diabetes or age? No longer would the bureaucrat at the other end of the phone say "we won’t pay for it" or "you don’t need it" or "we can’t fit you in at our facility." The answer would simply be no — even if you pay for it yourself, you may not have one. It is this type of coercion that drives Canadians over the border to the U.S. in search of medical options denied them at home under their socialized medical structure. Now it would operate on both sides of the border.
I guess we should expect nothing less from a person who says "we’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
She is targeting those who love her, the entitlement population. Those that believe they are ENTITLED to free health care, to drive a car, to smoke free restaurants. Free choice? Whats that to a leftist.
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“In every country across this planet socialized health care has failed or is failing miserably. ”
That is so patently aburd, such an absolute falsehood, one really must question your basic integrity for writing it.
Universal health care is in place in all these advanced countries as a result of the expressed will of the people. If you think messing with Social Security in the USA is a third rail, just try being a politician in any of these countries and propose doing away with their health care plan, and substituting something like the American system.
Your political carreer would be instantly finished as you would be laughed off the public stage.
In other words, the people who actually live under these health care regimes think they work infinitly better than what they had before, or what we have.
Ask the conservative politicians in those countries if you need any proof.
Its good to hear people like Steyn make the abusrd, dishonest arguments that he does. It assures me that republicans and conservatives will do everything they can to convince the American people that they are utterly clueless as to the real situation with regard to health care. I guarantee you that pushing the Steyn arguments will guarantee Hillary’s election.
Hillary’s solution doesn’t solve the problem. The problem is lifestyle choices. For instance a smoker gets cancer, runs up a big medical tab and a year later dies. Without treatment he might have lived two months. If he didn’t smoke he might have lived 20-40 more years. One of the most common cancers is skin cancer, genererally inflicted when somebody tries to “get some sun.” HIV from unsafe sex or sharing needles, heart disease from eating too much fat, brain damage from drugs, accidents from mechanical devices and even storing poisons in a place whre a kid can get to them are all lifestyle choices that run up the tab and end up burdening the system. It also doesn’t cure the medical mistakes that kill an estimated 95,000 U.S. citzens every year or stop diseases that have became immuned to drug treatment because people didn’t take their medication the right way.
If you list good lifestyle choices and few hospitals vs hospitals and poor lifestyle choice, you will get:
Deaths per 1,000 2007 est. from the CIA’s online The World Factbook:
Mexico 4.7
Iraq 5.2
The Philippines 5.36
India 6.58
Canada 7.86
United States 8.26
Switzerland 8.51
France 8.55
Japan 8.98
The UK 10.09
Germany 10.71
From these numbers, Hillary should be modeling her healthcare plan on Mexico’s or Iraq’s and not Canada’s or the UK’s.
JocCitizen,
Whats absurd is your contention that socialized medicine is working in those countries. Thats why we get many of their citizens stopping by to get to our health care system right?
I make the counter contention that people such as yourself who make these kind of idiotic comments shows the rest of us how far your leftists noggins are up your asses. She will NOT be the next president. I’m praying she gets the nomination tho, then it will be a 100% lock she loses.
So quit waving your Hillary banner while you can…
In any healthcare system you can have
1) Universal insurance coverage
2) Speedy and effective medical care
3) Controlled costs
Unfortunately, you can only have 2 out of the 3. You can pick any 2, but in the end you must sacrifice one. If you don’t understand why, you failed Econ 101, or had a Marxist professor.
It’s things like this that JoeCitizen and others like him don’t get. Rather, Curt has it right when he points out that just because other countries have socialized health care doesn’t mean it works.
Look at Social Security in the US. We have it, its politically impossible to dump it, yet anyone with a calculator and actuary table knows that it is a ponzi scheme that ultimately is doomed.
So why do we still have socialized health care and Social Security? In a word, Fear. People are justly afraid of being “left out in the cold”. And to an extent, I don’t blame them.
But the response to this fear is not to “give” them socialized anything. We need to move toward more market incentives, not away from them.
Finally, Gregory Dittman talks about “lifestyle choices”, but I’m afraid misses the point. In any HillaryCare system, rationing will be introduced, and the ones who are left waiting will be those who made poor lifestyle choices; drinking, smoking, and obesity come to mind. AIDS patients will be treated ASAP, because the gay lobby has the political clout to exempt themselves.
JC, Here’s where your argument fails miserably. “Messing with SS”? Social Security is a joke and will be totally broke in the next ten years, but just keep that little secret to yourself and your socialist buddys.
Government socialized (subsidized) medicine will be the same joke only worse. Dependence on the government that will eventually own your choices is not the direction this nation should follow. And this is the blindness of the left that has fed the lazyness and hapless to look for others to supply what market forces can do. We have some of the finest doctors and health care in the world RIGHT NOW! What the Hildabeast is proposing will destroy it all.
Is it just me, or is there some sort of scary resemblance between Hillary’s nurse image in this article…and Big Nurse from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest??? Yup, I can see it now…take your pill or we’ll zap you!!