Jolie Rouge

Hillary resurrects universal health care, claiming she's "learned a lot"

Clinton Touts Universal Health Care Plan
By MIKE GLOVER - The Associated Press
Monday, March 26, 2007; 12:28 PM

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Monday to create a universal health care system if elected, saying she "learned a lot" during the failed health care effort of her husband's presidency. "We're going to have universal health care when I'm president _ there's no doubt about that. We're going to get it done," the New York senator and front-runner for the 2008 nomination said.

Clinton focused on health care issues during an appearance on ABC's "Good Morning America" broadcast from the state where precinct caucuses will launch the presidential nominating season.

Asked how she could improve on her failed effort to reform health care during her husband's presidency, Clinton said pressure for change has built in the last decade and that would make tackling the issue easier. "I believe the American people are going to make this an issue," said Clinton. "I believe we're in a better position today to do that than we were in '93 and '94. ... It's one of the reasons I'm running for president."

After the televised meeting, Clinton headed to a Des Moines elementary school to receive the endorsement of former Gov. Tom Vilsack and his wife, Christie. "Hillary Clinton has been tried and tested like no other candidate for president," Tom Vilsack said.

His wife added, "To me, this is not just an endorsement but a commitment."

Clinton said her relationship with the Vilsacks dates to her work in the 1970s with Christie Vilsack's late brother, lawyer Tom Bell. "We will be crisscrossing Iowa and crisscrossing America," Clinton said.

In her earlier appearance, Clinton argued that health coverage has deteriorated over the last decade, and that's increased public pressure to act. "The number of uninsured has grown," said Clinton. "It's hard to ignore the fact that nearly 47 million people don't have health insurance, but also because so many people with insurance have found it's difficult to get health care because the insurance companies deny you what you need."

Clinton opened her latest campaign swing with a live broadcast from the Science Center of Iowa, where she spoke to more than 200 activists at a town meeting about health care issues. It's an issue with which she is very familiar. After her husband won the White House in 1992, she headed an effort to put a universal health care system in place. That effort eventually collapsed under pressure in part from the insurance industry.

However, while Clinton said the issue continues to be a high priority for her, she has not offered up a specific plan. One questioner at the town hall meeting held up a copy of a DVD containing a detailed description of Democratic rival John Edwards' plan for universal health care, asking Clinton if she will also offer specifics.

The reason she hasn't "set out a plan and said here's exactly what I will do," Clinton said, is that she wants to hear from voters what kind of plan they would favor. "I want the ideas that people have," said Clinton. She said any health care plan must deal with the reality that there's a unique climate in the country. "We are bigger and more diverse and people like their choice," said Clinton.

Edwards, a former North Carolina senator and 2004 Democratic runningmate, has said it's inevitable that taxes would have to go up to finance an expensive health care plan. Clinton disagreed. "We've got to get the costs under control," said Clinton. "Why would we put more money into a dysfunctional system?"

Clinton sidestepped a question on whether she'd consider Vilsack as a potential runningmate should she win the nomination. "I am a very big fan of Governor Vilsack," Clinton said, adding that he has "the kind of practical but visionary leadership we need in our country."

Vilsack was the first Democrat to formally enter the 2008 presidential race in November, but he dropped out last month citing the difficulty in raising the tens of millions of dollars necessary to mount a credible bid.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032600373.html



All seven Dem candidates are following the universal health care pied piper. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...ck=1&cset=true


Stuart Browning has a new video that provides a "cautionary example of where single-payer health care reform will lead if adopted in the United States." Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXZaTXDu3Os&eurl=

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Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

janelle

If she has learned a lot she should know it was a disaster to try to pass it. GEESH. I don't think she learned a thing from last time.


Government messes up most things it tries to run.

Jolie Rouge

John Edwards will give you Free Health
By William F. Buckley

The word among professional Democrats is that John Edwards has set the stakes on the matter of health care, and no one who wants to be president can offer less than he is offering, which is -- of course -- guaranteed health. That is to say, guaranteed free health care.

Mr. Edwards' primary complaint is that 47 million Americans do not have health insurance. In a free society, one scans this datum in search of its component parts.

If health insurance were without cost, one assumes that everyone would have health insurance. A corollary of this is that everyone, in a society of allegedly free health care, would actually be paying the collective costs of health care. The political challenge lies in disguising the cost.

When a commodity is quantifiably measurable, yet universally available, like air, one can talk about its being "free". Only people in submarines need to measure air, and to pay the cost of supplying it. Health care, unlike air, can't be free, because doctors and nurses and drugs are not in infinite supply. So can we generate what amounts to a public subsidy by reducing the costs of health care?

To look that problem in the face, we search out relevant figures. One set of these reveals that the cost of health care for an American is twice what it is for a Western European. If in Germany it costs $100 per day per patient at a hospital, while a comparable hospital stay in the United States costs $200, one reaches for an explanation. Is it that American health care is twice as expensive because it is twice as comprehensive, twice as resourceful? Or is it simply that, for other reasons, doctors and nurses and drugs cost twice as much in the United States?

In any case, how do we go about reducing these costs? Either you pass a law that doctors and nurses and drug companies have to slash the cost of their services and products by one-half -- a proposal nowhere hinted at by Mr. Edwards -- or else we need to reduce the number of people entitled to receive that health service. How do you do that?

Not by going in the direction proposed by Candidate Edwards, but by going in the opposite direction. His proposal is that more people should be covered. But if more people are insured, they will increase their consumption of health care, and therefore increase the total U.S. expenditure on health care.

But John Edwards calls for something different -- a fiscal frumpery by which the cost of health care is somehow dissipated. This is done by obscuring the agent by which health care is provided. It has frequently been noticed by social philosophers that from about 1943, when income taxes were first collected so to speak at the source, via withholding, the average worker does not think of himself as being taxed -- because the instrument by which the money is taken is so automatic as to be more or less invisible. When an American worker is hired at $700 per week, he reckons his income not at $700, but at $500, which is the size of his paycheck.

Mr. Edwards speaks grandly about health coverage for 47 million people who do not now have it. But unless there is a diminution in the cost of health services, they will be paid for by somebody. If it is so that the 47 million without insurance are the identical 47 million who are the nation's poorest, then it might be said that all we are really engaging in is more redistribution. There is a case to be made for this, and indeed, redistribution has been accepted for years. The wealthiest 5 percent of Americans pay 54 percent of all taxes, which means they are paying taxes that would otherwise be paid by the 95 percent of Americans whose tax rates are lower.

Therefore, Mr. Edwards is doing nothing more than to call for increased taxes on the wealthy. They used to call that socialized medicine, when it was instituted by Great Britain after the war. It crossed the Atlantic into Canada, which is a tidy country in which to get sick, provided you can afford to travel across the border to an American doctor.

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Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

speedygirl

We should all move to Massachusetts where every citizen is required to have health insurance by law.

BOSTON, April 4 — Massachusetts is poised to become the first state to provide nearly universal health care coverage with a bill passed overwhelmingly by the legislature Tuesday that Gov. Mitt Romney says he will sign.

The bill does what health experts say no other state has been able to do: provide a mechanism for all of its citizens to obtain health insurance. It accomplishes that in a way that experts say combines methods and proposals from across the political spectrum, apportioning the cost among businesses, individuals and the government.

"This is probably about as close as you can get to universal," said Paul B. Ginsburg, president of the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington. "It's definitely going to be inspiring to other states about how there was this compromise. They found a way to get to a major expansion of coverage that people could agree on. For a conservative Republican, this is individual responsibility. For a Democrat, this is government helping those that need help."

The bill, the product of months of wrangling between legislators and the governor, requires all Massachusetts residents to obtain health coverage by July 1, 2007.

Individuals who can afford private insurance will be penalized on their state income taxes if they do not purchase it. Government subsidies to private insurance plans will allow more of the working poor to buy insurance and will expand the number of children who are eligible for free coverage. Businesses with more than 10 workers that do not provide insurance will be assessed up to $295 per employee per year.

All told, the plan is expected to cover 515,000 uninsured people within three years, about 95 percent of the state's uninsured population, legislators said, leaving less than 1 percent of the population unprotected.

"It is not a typical Massachusetts-Taxachusetts, oh-just-crazy-liberal plan," said Stuart H. Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University. "It isn't that at all. It is a pretty moderate approach, and that's what's impressive about it. It tried to borrow and blend a lot of different pieces."

Many states, including Massachusetts, have been wrestling for years with how to cover the uninsured, and several states have come close, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Hawaii passed a universal access law in 1974 requiring employers to offer health care coverage for employees working 20 hours or more a week, but nearly 10 percent of people remain uncovered. Efforts to cover all citizens in Minnesota and Vermont in 1992 and in Massachusetts in 1988 fell flat in the mid-1990s when the language in the bills concerning universal coverage was repealed.

In 2003, Maine enacted a law that significantly broadened insurance coverage and combined employer payments with expanded government programs. That year, California enacted a law that required employer contributions, but it was repealed in a referendum in 2004. Massachusetts would be the first state to require its citizens to have health insurance.

The Massachusetts bill creates a sliding scale of affordability ranging from people who can afford insurance outright to those who cannot afford it at all. About 215,000 people will be covered by allowing individuals and businesses with 50 or fewer employees to buy insurance with pretax dollars, and by giving insurance companies incentives to offer stripped-down plans at lower cost. Lower-cost basic plans will be available to people ages 19 to 26.

Subsidies for other private plans will be available for people with incomes at or below 300 percent of the poverty level. Children in those families will be eligible for free coverage through Medicaid, an expansion of the current system.

The Massachusetts bill was hammered out with proposals and input from state Democratic legislators; Mr. Romney, a Republican; Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Democrat; insurers; academics; businesses; hospitals; and advocates for the poor, including religious leaders.

They were motivated in part by a threat by the federal government to eliminate $385 million in federal Medicaid money unless the state reduced the number of uninsured people. The state was supposed to have the bill completed by January, but state officials said they were confident that the federal government would approve of Tuesday's bill.
"Whenever you can have the medical community, the business community and the advocates all applauding our efforts, I think that's indicative of a successful exercise," said State Senator Robert E. Travaglini, the majority leader.

Mr. Romney, who is considering running for president in 2008, said in an interview Tuesday that the bill, passed by a legislature that is 85 percent Democratic, was "95 percent of what I proposed."

He said, "This is really a landmark for our state because this proves at this stage that we can get health insurance for all our citizens without raising taxes and without a government takeover. The old single-payer canard is gone."

Mr. Romney pushed the idea of the "individual mandate," requiring people who can afford insurance to buy it. The bill makes it possible for employers to enable many of those people to use pretax dollars, saving them 25 percent or more. Individuals who fail to get health insurance by July 2007 will first lose their personal exemption on their state taxes. In subsequent years, they would have to pay a penalty that could be as high as half of what an affordable health care premium would cost.

Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor's communications director, said that for those people with incomes above 300 percent of poverty, "our assumption was that these would be mostly single mothers who just did not have the wherewithal to get insurance. It turned out it was mostly young males. In some cases they are making very attractive salaries. These are people who just don't imagine themselves needing care, but of course when they break a leg when they're out bungee jumping they go to the hospital and we end up paying for their care anyway."

One element that Mr. Romney and some legislators did not want was the fee for employers who do not provide health insurance.

For several months the bill seemed stalled because the House and Senate leaders could not agree on the issue of charging businesses. One proposal of an $800-per-employee charge was reduced to a maximum of $295 that would go toward paying costs for the uninsured and would be reduced as more people became insured, Mr. Travaglini said.

Because the bill is part of a budget bill, Mr. Romney has line-item veto power. He said Tuesday that he would likely change the business fee provision in some way or veto it before signing the bill.

Still, he did not seem that worried about it, saying he had been most concerned that the fee not be a payroll tax, as had been originally proposed. Mr. Travaglini said that if Mr. Romney vetoed the business fee, the legislature would override it.

Bob Baker, president of the Smaller Business Association of New England, said his members seemed to accept the idea of the fee.

"The notion of the level playing field, I think from an element of fairness and equity, people are O.K. with it, unless it impinges on their ability to pay for it," Mr. Baker said. "There hasn't been a hue and cry among our members."

Mr. Romney said that with more people insured, everyone would "get better health care" and that premiums for people who already had insurance might drop because "providers won't be pushing the cost of the uninsured onto the people who have insurance."

James Roosevelt Jr., president and chief executive of Tufts Health Plan, agreed.

"I think that will help both improve the quality of health care and lower the cost," Mr. Roosevelt said, but he added, "We would have liked more flexibility in the design of health plans to permit lower premiums that are affordable for all people."

The program, which was approved 154 to 2 in the House and 37 to 0 in the Senate, will cost $1.2 billion over three years, but only $125 million of that will be new state money. The rest will come from federal money and existing state money. After three years, lawmakers say, no new state money will be required. A new agency will administer the system.

Advocates for the uninsured held a victory rally at the Statehouse.

"We're thrilled that this truly represents a commitment to the poor and the working poor," said Rabbi Jonah Pesner, a leader of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization.

Joseph Landais, 64, could use insurance for himself, his wife and three children. Mr. Landais, a retired hospital custodian, said his wife, a nurse's aide, makes too much for the family to be eligible for Medicaid but not enough to afford insurance. He had a hernia operation four months ago that he did not have to pay for under the free-care pool, but he had not been able to see a doctor since then, even though he is still not feeling well.

"After years that you've been working that hard," Mr. Landais said, "I think you deserve something back."

gldnretrvr

I urge all of the readers on this forum that if they want to know what John Edward's ideas are on providing healthcare insurance to all, to go to the website johnedwardsforpresident.com. On this site is where you will get the actual plan that he has, and not from another source such as William F. Buckley whom is a biased Republican. I don't get my haircut from my plumber and I want my opinions straight from the candidates and not from someone who does a smear campaign from another political party.

Jolie Rouge

LOL - I always would recomeend doing your own research into the topics offered for discussion. Basing your political views just on an online forum board would be like relying on Leno and Letterman for your evening news...

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Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

LuvBigRip

We all know what a wonderful job the government does at managing health care. Look at the Veterans Hospitals. The government can't manage itself.

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The oil is all in Texas, but the dipsticks are in D.C.

freeby4me

Thats quite true....The best prediction for future actions is past behavior...

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Faux News: We pour the lies and you drink them up!

LuvBigRip

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The oil is all in Texas, but the dipsticks are in D.C.

Jolie Rouge

Yes - these are the people I want in charge of *my* health care ... NOT

VA Patient Has Wrong Testicle Removed
April 4, 2007

LOS ANGELES (AP) - An Air Force veteran has filed a federal claim after an operation at a Veterans Administration hospital in which a healthy testicle was removed instead of a potentially cancerous one.

Benjamin Houghton, 47, was to have had his left testicle removed June 14 at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center because there was a chance it could harbor cancer cells. It also was atrophied and painful.

But doctors mistakenly removed the right testicle, according to medical records and the claim, which seeks $200,000 for future care and unspecified damages. He still hasn't had the other testicle removed. "At first I thought it was a joke," Houghton told the Los Angeles Times. "Then I was shocked. I told them, 'What do I do now?'"

Houghton, his wife, Monica, and their attorney, Dr. Susan Friery, said they hoped to get the VA's attention by going public with the situation.

Dr. Dean Norman, chief of staff for the Greater Los Angeles VA system, has formally apologized to Houghton and his wife. "We are making every attempt that we can to care for Mr. Houghton, but it's in litigation, and that's all we can tell you," he said. The hospital changed practices as a result of the case, he added.

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Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

pepperpot

Has she really learned a lot?........She's still with that cheating fool...

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Mrs Pepperpot is a lady who always copes with the tricky situations that she finds herself in....