PrintSeptember 17, 2007
Are You Ready For "Hillarycare: The Sequel?"
Just when you thought it was safe to go back tp the doctor's office, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is resurrecting her abominable national health care proposal:
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is unveiling a sweeping health care proposal Monday that would require everyone to carry health insurance and offer federal subsidies to help reduce the cost of coverage.Some Choice! Any plan that "requires" people to do anything - even carry health insurance itself - is a slap in the face to American liberty. No matter how cheap you make health insurance, there will be millions unable to afford any premiums at all. For those people, Hillary has decided to simply dump their health care onto the federal government.
Fulfilling a pledge to bring health care to everyone, Clinton's "American Health Choices Plan" has a price tag of about $110 billion per year. It represents her first major effort to achieve universal health coverage since 1994, when the plan she authored during her husband's first term collapsed.
The former first lady says she has learned from that experience, which almost derailed Bill Clinton's presidency and helped put Republicans in control of Congress for years to come. Aides say she has jettisoned the complexity and uncertainty of the last effort in favor of a plan that stresses simplicity, cost control and consumer choice.
For individuals and families who are not covered by employers or whose employer-based coverage is inadequate, Clinton would offer expanded versions of two existing government programs: Medicare, and the health insurance plan currently offered to federal employees. Consumers could choose between either government-run program, but aides stress that no new federal bureaucracy would be created under the Clinton plan.This cockamamie scheme is excused by trying the old canard comparing health insurance to auto insurance - something most states require if you are going to drive.
The idiocy of this comparison is that you can get minimum auto liability coverage for about $25 a month while most health plans cost around 10 times that much. Even mandating lower insurance premiums and giving tax breaks for health care coverage will not bring the cost down dramatically enough that many of the 48 million people who aren't insured at present will be able to purchase insurance coverage.
This and other Democratic health insurance plans advanced during the campaign almost guarantee the destruction of the health care system we have in place while closing off options to most people as well as almost surely rationing health care that will be offered.
The American people want health care costs brought down and they want reasonable insurance premiums that will get them adequate care. None of the Democratic plans - least of all Hillary's - promises any of this. All they do is pile more responsibility on top of an already busted federal health care system - reason enough to reject Hillary's plan as well as her candidacy.
