Links With Your Coffee - Sunday
- Healthcare numbers - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog
One conclusion is that trying to cover the uninsured with tax credits, Bush-style, is — surprise, surprise — a very inefficient strategy: lots of revenue loss, while most of the people who get the benefits would have been insured anyway.
But the big conclusion, relevant to current debates, is on the role of mandates. Gruber compares a program of mandate-less subsidies to help people pay for insurance — broadly similar to the Obama plan — with a program that combines subsidies with mandates — broadly similar to the Edwards and Clinton plans.
The table below summarizes the key results. The mandate-less plan covers only about half the uninsured. The plan with mandates gets almost everyone, at an additional cost of $22 billion — about $1,000 per additional person covered.
- Robert Reich's Blog: Democrats Should Stop Squabbling Over Healthcare Mandates
Democrats should be celebrating. Their three major candidates have put health insurance front and center on the domestic agenda, and with plans that are remarkably similar. They've done so at a time when the public seems readier than ever before to embrace universal health insurance, and readier to trust a Democratic president to put it into effect.
But instead of celebrating, the candidates and left-leaning pundits are squabbling over whether the plans should include so-called mandates that require everyone to purchase health insurance. Talk about self-inflicted wounds. Mandates are a sideshow, and fighting over them risks turning away voters from the main event.
Comments
Norm, do you agree with Reich's thesis? If the differences between Clinton's and Obama's health plans are not significant, how does that affect your thinking as to which candidate you will support?
In other news...whoops.
Sorry to be sarcastic but that really ticked me off today.
Essentially, this seems to boil down to whether you force everyone to buy health care, even people that don't want it (and often don't "need" it). Hillary's plan has the advantage of keeping costs lower, and Barack's has the advantage of protecting people's liberty and not forcing them to proactively buy in.
With the right plan, both candidates can technically adhere to the principle they sought out to defend for their health care plan -- and that would be to have the government pay fully for federal health coverage for all citizens, with partial (or possibly full) vouchers that people can use to (help) acquire a private plan that suits them. Sure, we'd have to raise taxes, but people also ought to be paid more by their employers that no longer have to pay for those benefits themselves, right? (Of course, cheapskates that abused part-time to avoid paying out will perhaps force us to increase the minimum wage extra to compensate, but minimum wage is already so far behind the $9+ pace set back in the late '60s that cranking it up to around $10 in a few years is well-justified).
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