03-13-2003, 05:19 PM
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#11
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Veteran Member
Join Date: Aug 2000
Location: Well fortified mountain bunker
Posts: 3,567
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I found some more on this at The Nation, for anybody interested.
Quote:
On healthcare, Dean is no fan of sweeping reforms, such as the creation of a national insurance system. He tried to achieve universal coverage in his state and was beaten back, and he watched what happened to Hillarycare. So forget about it: "What I want to do is to get everyone in the system first and then we can argue about how to reform the system. And it's very simple." He would expand Medicaid to children and young adults under the age of 23, add a prescription drug benefit for the elderly within Medicare, and cover everyone in between by providing subsidies to businesses and individuals so workers could obtain health insurance "in the market." This would not be, he notes, "a big-government-run program."
How much of a subsidy? After all, Bush called for a subsidy, but it was too small to make enough of a difference to most of the uninsured. "We're working on that," Dean says. The money would come from undoing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. But, he explains, "this is not a Cadillac health insurance program. You can't give the same benefits you might give at IBM. If you did, why would IBM bother to give anyone health insurance?... It's a catastrophic health insurance program with first-dollar coverage for things like colonoscopies and mammograms that nobody would get if they had to pay for them. But after that, there's a big deductible." Would a national, government-run health insurance program make more sense? "Sure, it might work," he replies. "But we're not going to pass it. So why bother? I am totally pragmatically oriented.... It's like the Congress now--they're fighting about the patients' bill of rights. How ridiculous. Our party ought to be fighting for health insurance for every man, woman and child. Who cares what patients' bill of rights bill passes?" Wouldn't HMOs still dominate the healthcare landscape? "States," he answers, "have really cracked down on HMOs.... HMOs are not as hated as they once were."
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