SEARCH
How Do Obama and McCain Compare on Health Care? |
|
 |
|
How would Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain tackle the health care crisis if elected president? It’s one of the most important questions at stake in the 2008 election.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) offers new analysis of the candidates’ health care proposals, and the result is clear: Obama’s proposal would cover more people, more efficiently.
Obama’s health care plan is based on the principles that are essential to successful reform of the health care system: expanding affordable, high-quality health care coverage to everyone. While families could keep the coverage they have now, they also would enjoy a wider array of options, including a public plan. Increasing the number of people covered is essential to lowering health care costs across the market—not just for the uninsured, but for everyone. According to the EPI analysis:
This large pool would have substantial administrative and marketing cost-savings relative to the existing non-group market, creating potential savings not just for those judged to be bad risks by insurance companies, but for all purchasers who do not currently have access to employer or public programs.
McCain’s health care plan won’t cut costs or cover more people. Indeed, McCain’s health care plan could wind up raising taxes for millions of working families or lead to them losing benefits altogether. His approach would fundamentally alter the health care system for the worse, especially for people with health problems. McCain’s plan could even drive the cost of health care further up. As the EPI analysis notes:
McCain’s plan changes the incentives for purchasing in the employer market as compared to the individual market. This change will lead to destabilized employer pools and fewer employers offering insurance.
Some of the people who lose coverage through their employer will simply lose coverage altogether. The individual market subjects individuals to the whims of the insurance industry: poor information about policies, discriminatory pricing, coverage waivers, refusal to pay for pre-existing conditions, and denial of policy renewal. To make matters worse, other parts of the McCain plan remove many of the (already insufficient) consumer protections that currently exist in state regulations.
The real beneficiaries of McCain’s plan would be the private insurance companies, whose market share would skyrocket while regulations protecting consumers withered away. Those same insurance companies would see huge corporate tax cuts from McCain’s plan (nearly $2 billion to the top 10 companies). Under McCain’s plan, insurance companies would rake in the profits, while working families would be left on their own at the mercy of the insurance market.
McCain’s campaign, of course, is packed with advisers and fundraisers who are lobbyists for the health insurance industry. Is it any wonder that his health care policies are aimed more at the insurers than consumers?
Health care is a critical difference between these two candidates, and the union members taking part in the AFL-CIO’s Labor 2008 political mobilization program have been working hard making sure that difference is clear. In May, thousands of union volunteers knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors in union member-to-member walks focused on health care.
The next president has the opportunity to make the health care system work better for everyone—a crucial ingredient in making sure the economy is strong and families are secure. When it comes to health care, the differences between the candidates are clear.
____________________________________________
Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
2 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Obama’s Health Plan, Dissected
Letter to the Editor
New York Times
July 25, 2008
To the Editor:
Barack Obama proposes to make health care affordable for all Americans with an injection of cash from the repeal of the Bush tax cuts and with savings realized from electronic health information technology and programs to improve disease prevention and chronic disease management. While better record-keeping and prevention and management programs would improve the quality of our medical system, there is little data that they would actually save money. They certainly would not do so for many years.
Most waste in our health care system is a result of our reliance on private health insurers. Having multiple competing insurers results in costs for marketing, underwriting, billing, claims adjudication, executive salaries and profit.
Administrative costs account for 31 percent of all health care spending in the United States, but only 17 percent in Canada’s single payer system. The administrative costs of America’s own single-payer system, Medicare, are only about 3 percent, compared with 12 to 15 percent for private insurers.
If Mr. Obama wants to save enough to provide health care for every American, he needs to open the debate to include consideration of Medicare for all in the United States.
Rachel Nardin
Cambridge, Mass.
The writer, an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, is chairwoman of the Massachusetts chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.
Make original Medicare the foundation for health care reform
JOHN GEYMAN AND MALINDA MARKOWITZ
Seattle Post Intelligencer
Guest Columnist
As Medicare celebrates its 43rd birthday this week, it’s time to take stock of one of the most popular government programs of all time that guarantees all Americans 65 years of age and older universal coverage of comprehensive health care benefits.
At the time of its passage, American seniors were having great difficulty affording health care, especially the costs of hospitalization. They were paying 15 percent of their annual income on health care. Many millions were unable to afford either insurance or their medical bills. Enactment of Medicare gave them access to a set of benefits defined by law, as an earned right for which they contributed, without regard to their health status or income.
Medicare today covers about 43 million American seniors and the disabled, paying about one-half of their health care expenses. Amidst an increasingly unaffordable health care market, Medicare recipients have a solid rock of coverage. The program is administered with an overhead of about 3 percent, less than one-fifth the overhead of competing private programs, while offering defined benefits with free choice of physician and hospital.
A survey by the Commonwealth Fund in 2002 found that Medicare beneficiaries rate the program much higher than private health insurance in terms of quality, help with access to care and payment of their medical bills. A binding social contract has been established and kept with eligible beneficiaries that they can trust and depend on. Even at that, seniors are paying much more out of pocket now than they were in 1965 for health care - 22 percent of their annual income.
Despite its many successes, Medicare has been under relentless attack by conservatives, market stakeholders and their lobbyists pushing to “save” Medicare by killing it. Their agenda is to siphon off more affluent seniors to private plans and shrink Medicare to a much smaller program. There is no ambiguity in this goal. As then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said at the time, this kind of “reform” could “solve the Medicare problem” and cause the program to “wither on the vine.”
Private Medicare plans have proven themselves to be more expensive and less reliable. Despite their claims of more choice, better benefits and value, their track record is one of exploitation, made possible only by generous subsidies by the government. The original premise was that these plans would save the government money, but that soon fell by the wayside. Private insurers lobbied early and successfully for generous overpayments. Today’s overpayments average about 12 percent, with the fastest growing private fee-for-service plans at 19 percent.
What do we get for this privatization boondoggle? In the late 1990s, 2.4 million seniors were forced to find new coverage, and often to change doctors, when many Medicare plus Choice plans left the market due to insufficient profits. The 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act continued generous government subsidies while also prohibiting the government from negotiating bulk discounts from drug manufacturers as the VA does so effectively with discounts of about 45 percent.
The Government Accounting Office has concluded that private Medicare plans are more expensive, offer fewer benefits than claimed and are of questionable value as public policy.
All incremental efforts to control health care costs have failed over the last 30 years. There are now 75 million uninsured and underinsured, both categories which are growing rapidly with no end in sight. Access to health care for middle-class Americans is seriously threatened, and medical bills have become a leading cause of bankruptcy.
Amidst this deteriorating landscape, original Medicare stands as a shining example of a needs-based program that has consistently served the public interest. Despite being weakened by privatizing, it gives us a solid foundation for real health care reform, when access to necessary health care is even more difficult than in the 1960s.
It is time to expand Medicare as a social insurance program for all Americans through a single risk pool of all 300 million of us. This is the most efficient, fair and sustainable way to insure us all against the costs of illness and injury, coupled with the strengths of our private delivery system. Expansion and improvement is the best way to “save” Medicare.
John Geyman is professor emeritus of family medicine, University of Washington, and past president, Physicians for a National Health Program. Malinda Markowitz is co-president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
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.
HR 676 currently has 91 co-sponsors in addition to Conyers.
Co-sponsors and bill text are here:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.r.00676:
HR 676 has been endorsed by 449 union organizations in 49 states
including 110 Central Labor Councils and Area Labor Federations and 36 state AFL-CIO’s (KY, PA, CT, OH, DE, ND, WA, SC, WY, VT, FL, WI, WV, SD, NC, MO, MN, ME, AR, MD-DC, TX, IA, AZ, TN, OR, GA, OK, KS, CO, IN, AL, CA, AK, MI, MT & NE).
This letter is an excellent post to counter the uncritical Obama-mania that has taken hold across the country. A critical examination of the ISSUES reveals that Obama is NOT a “progressive” alternative to McCain. Corporate interests have gotten behind Obama and his pro-corporate positions on many things is becoming apparent even before the Democratic Party convention.
His energy plan, linked eleswhere, shows Obama is FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY and is FOR POLLUTING COAL INDUSTRY!
If Obama, and his Vice President, do not actively support HR676, there should be a massive shit in support to Cynthia McKinney and the Greens who want to END the wars, corporate control of government, and support a national health plan without corporate profit.