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Clinton Announces American Health Choices Plan |
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Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) today released her proposal for universal health coverage. Under the American Health Choices Plan consumers could keep their existing insurance, join a group insurance plan through a program modeled on the benefit plans available to members of Congress or join a public program modeled on Medicare but with the same benefits available under the group insurance plans. Everyone will be required to choose one of these options.
In a Des Moines, Iowa, speech announcing the plan, Clinton said:
Today as we strive for a new beginning to the 21st century, I believe that everyone—every man, woman and child—should have quality, affordable health care in America. We can no longer tolerate the injustice of a system that shuts out nearly one in six Americans.
Clinton’s plan includes features to make health coverage more affordable, primarily through a refundable tax credit aimed at capping premium payments at a yet-to-be-specified percentage of income. The plan also includes an initiative to help companies cover the costs of health coverage for retirees.
The plan will be paid for partially through cost savings, including large-scale prescription drug price negotiation and the phase out of Medicare overpayments to HMOs, and partially through the rollback of the portion of the Bush tax cuts aimed at the wealthiest Americans.
Clinton’s campaign contends the plan’s refundable tax credits will result in a net tax cut for the broad majority of families.
Clinton also proposes steps to end insurance discrimination through across-the-board rules that prevent denial of coverage and excessive premiums.
Today’s announcement is the third major health care speech by Clinton during her presidential campaign. In May, she opened her health care efforts with proposals to decrease costs, and in August, she released a plan to improve health care quality.
Health care has become a major issue in the 2008 race, with nearly all Democratic candidates and four Republican candidates offering proposals. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is co-sponsor of a bill to create a universal single-payer system, while former Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-N.Y.) has proposed shifting health care responsibility to individuals, who would be left to deal with private insurers on their own. Other presidential candidates who have released health care plans include Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-Ark.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.), and former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.).
The AFL-CIO has launched a major drive in support of secure, high-quality health care for all. The unions of the AFL-CIO are mobilizing a 1-million-member health care team working with a broad alliance of grassroots organizations to win progressive reform and give millions more union members the information and tools to become active players and health care voters. (Sign the petition for children’s health care and stop back often at the AFL-CIO health care site to get the latest updates.)
Details of the Clinton plan are available for download (PDF) at Sen. Clinton’s website. You can find out more about the candidates’ positions on heath care at Working Families Vote 2008.
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Senator Clinton’s Universal Health Care plan is well thought out, comprenhensive, creative, and viable. It is the sort of proposal which IMO, can garner the broad support necessary to pass Congress.
It is good to see another Democrat put a plan on the table. I still prefer the plan proposed months ago by John Edwards. Let’s don’t forget about it even though his has been out for such a long time! It is great that this AFL-CIO site provides links so that it is easy to review the Edwards plan, and also look over the Obama plan. This is an important issue, and the details matter! For me, Edwards gets it right because he takes a stronger stand against conventional insurance companies. He offers us choices, but he is not making deals with big companies in order to push a plan through. His plan will provide substantial assistance to all Americans, and bring about change faster. It is my personal opinion, that if Edwards had not presented a plan that got people excited…. the other candidates may not have come up with plans. I admire him for being the first out with plans on all of the issues that matter to me.
Clinton’s plan is NOT a true Universal plan. The insurance industry is still involved, if capping premiums is the solution, why hasn’t it been done already? The lobbyists will start throwing huge checks at legislators to halt negotiations. (Hello, Mrs. Clinton)
Why so many options?
Let’s stick to a true Universal plan like Rep. Kucinich’s HR 676. HR 676 would institute a single payer health care system in the U.S. by expanding a greatly improved Medicare system to every resident.
HR 676 would cover every person in the U. S. for all necessary medical care including prescription drugs, hospital, surgical, outpatient services, primary and preventive care, emergency services, dental, mental health, home health, physical therapy, rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care, chiropractic and long term care. HR 676 ends deductibles and co-payments. HR 676 would save billions annually by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private health insurance
industry and HMOs.
Look at the facts carefully before you confirm your endoresment for president. We want change or 4 years of the same old shit?
Our current Congress the majority, has not scored a major victory except for the minimum wage hike. That’s all it was the very minimum! And they still can’t control our dictator’s moves. He will leave office leaving the new Democrat President with his mess. And he will laugh his ass all the way back to Crawford, untouched. Contact your congress people! Tell them to get with it!
Auto insurance is mandatory. How many people drive without auto insurance because they can’t afford even the cheapest premium? As for “competition,” how many people have had their phone bill or insurance premiums go down because the companies were competing with each other?
This is just another ploy from the insurance companies with their favorite Senator fronting for them yet again.
I’m still trying to figure out why money should be the yardstick used to decide whether I get quality health care.
Hillary has chosen a healthcare plan which will bring profits to the largest lobbies in America, the insurance industry and the pharmicutical industry.
If there ever was a doubt Hillary is George W in a dress, this should erase all of those doubts.
She has chosen a method which will require every person in America to pay for HER lobbiests, and campaign funds as you can easily see they are who gave her this outline for a plan.
If there is any doubt that this plan will drive up health insurance costs while reducing coverage, yo only need to look at the auto insurance industry and the effects mandatory insurance has had on it. When the insurance companies have you by the short hairs, they tend to bend you over and——
Thanks Hillary once again you prove that your alliance is to corporate interests, not to working men and women.
So Senator Clinton would give a “refundable tax credit”. So until you recieve your tax credit, where do you get the funds to pay the insurance premium??? Or will it just be ayearly payment to “take care of your tax refund”???
Why has Hillary abandoned her original universal heathcare plan from the early 90’s? What is she trying to say? Surely, she had it right back then; if not, how could she have it right now? If she’s got it right, now; then, she must have had it all wrong, before. The Republicans are going to have a field day on the new flip-flopping Hillarycare and we’re never going to be able to have quality affordable healthcare. John Edwards is right on the mark with his healthcare proposal!
We are long past the point where incremental reforms can salvage our health care system. We need to stop messing with these complicated formulas that don’t attack the core of the problem, and get behind HR 676. Kucinich should not be the only one pushing it.
Requiring people to buy health insurance simply provides the insurance companies with a guaranteed market. Organized labor was instrumental in the rise of the group health insurance industry 50 years ago; we have a responsibnility to put this Frankenstein monster to rest before it does any more damage. Consensus-building is all very well but there is simply no way to reconcile the health needs of the American people with the profits of the insurance industry. Hilary should have learned that back in ‘93.
I beleive that things are no different with the Mrs. than they turned out to be with the Mr. Mrs. Clinton wants to be president of The United States, yet she, unlike millions of Americans, was fooled by Mr. Bush and then taken in by second rate intelligence. Repeatedly, she claims that if she knew then what she knows now she would not have voted to support the president’s request. Yet no one that I know, including Charlie Rose and Bill Maher, has ever asked her that if, as she insists, what she knew then differs with what she knows now, then what exactly was it SHE KNEW THEN?
Further . . .
Her health plan will deliver the entire nation into
permanent bondage to big insurance and big pharma and big medicine. . .this in the same way that Mr. Clinton help deliver American workers into permanent bondange to the bottom line of international capital.
The ALF-CIO is so afraid of Bush that, rather than
support the real labor candidate, it will take the practical path. It will (AGAIN!) ask: “Who has the best chance of defeating the right wing?” In supporting Mrs. Clinton, as it should now just admit it it will do, the AFT/CIO assures that we never free ourselves of that right-wing imperial philosophy.
The record shows, clearly and unequivocally, that only one candidate carries the values of American Labor and the health of the nation in a clear single payer program. The other candidates, including Clinton and Edwards, will stick it to us as they ask for our vote! . . . and for our part, it seems altogether likely that we will chicken out and give it to her.
In Mrs. Clinton’s scheme of things, the energy of the American people will not serve the interests of the American people.
The insurance companies are one of the biggest factors in the inefficiency, unfairness and excessive costs of American healthcare and Hillary Clinton wants to keep them fully in the picture instead of creating a single payer sytsem. Her system is a sellout to the self interest of these corporations and would exacerbate the cost of healthcare. Social Security is a prime example of government being efficient in terms of cost overhead. Private insurance in healthcare is an example of extreme inefficiency in the private sector. The government would be much more efficient and equitable than the private sector in the administration of benefits because it can create a single system of benefits, rather than multiple ones that sick people would have to negotiate and fight with. The private sector needs to have a large place in the actual backend delivery of healthcare but not in the frontend administration interfacing with benefits and the public. A single payer system is what is needed.
It’s really very simple:
Hilary Clinton (and nearly ALL of the other Democratic candidates) = Universal Health INSURANCE (we will continue to pay for our health care via premiums, deductibles, and co-pays) run by highly-profittable (at our expense) Private Corporate Helath Insurance Companies.
Dennis Kucinich (the ONLY card carrying LABOR UNION MEMBER among the candidates, REMEMBER?) = Universal Health CARE (we will NO LONGER have to pay any more premiums, deductibles, and co-pays…EVER!) ALL paid for by the government (think Medicaid (which is an excellent program!) for all.
So…the LABOR UNION leaders choose to endorse Hillary anyway…
HUH?!!