Health Insurance

April 5, 1993 http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FChristopher-Hitchens%2Fe%2FB000APSKR0%3Fqid%3D1278211708%26sr%3D1-2-ent&tag=doc06-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

Watch the full program: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/08/christopher-hitchens-on-first-100-days.html

The Clinton health care plan was a 1993 healthcare reform package proposed by the administration of President Bill Clinton and closely associated with the chair of the task force devising the plan, First Lady of the United States Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Bill Clinton had campaigned heavily on health care in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. The task force was created in January 1993, but its own processes were somewhat controversial and drew litigation. Its goal was to come up with a comprehensive plan to provide universal health care for all Americans, which was to be a cornerstone of the administration’s first-term agenda. A major health care speech was delivered by President Clinton to the U.S. Congress in September 1993. The core element of the proposed plan was an enforced mandate for employers to provide health insurance coverage to all of their employees through competitive but closely-regulated health maintenance organizations.

Opposition to the plan was heavy from conservatives, libertarians, and the health insurance industry. The industry produced a much-talked-about television ad, “Harry and Louise”, in an effort to rally public support against the plan. Democrats, instead of uniting behind the President’s original proposal, offered a number of competing plans of their own. By September 1994, the final compromise Democratic bill was declared dead by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell. Opponents of the plan continued to deride it in future years as “HillaryCare.”

Before President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010, the United States was the only wealthy, industrialized nation that did not provide some form of universal health care, other than Medicare. Although the United States has never had a universal health care system, it does have certain publicly funded health care programs that help to provide for the elderly and disabled (via Medicare), military service families, veterans (via the Veterans Health Administration), and some of the poor (via Medicaid), and children via S-CHIP. Additionally, federal law guarantees public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay. Bill Clinton had campaigned heavily on health care in the 1992 election. The 1993 Clinton health care plan is sometimes called “HillaryCare” by opponents.

Hart declined to run for re-election to the Senate, leaving office when his second term expired with the intent of running for president again. In January 1987, he was the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the 1988 election.

Hart officially declared his candidacy on April 13, 1987. Rumors began circulating nearly immediately that Hart was having an extramarital affair. In an interview that appeared in the New York Times on May 3, 1987, Hart responded to the rumors by daring the press corps: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.” The Miami Herald had been investigating Hart’s alleged womanizing for weeks before the “dare” appeared in the New York Times. Two reporters from the Miami Herald had staked out his residence and observed a young woman leaving Hart’s Washington, D.C., townhouse on the evening of May 2. The Herald published the story on May 3, the same day Hart’s dare appeared in print, and the scandal spread rapidly through the national media. Hart and his allies attacked the Herald for rushing the story into print, claiming that it had unfairly judged the situation without finding out the facts. Hart said that the reporters had not watched both entrances to his home and could not have seen when the young woman entered and left the building. The Miami Herald reporter had flown to Washington, D.C. on the same flight as the woman, identified as Donna Rice. Hart was overwhelmed with questions regarding his views on marital infidelity. His wife, Lee, supported his position that the relationship with the young woman was innocent. A poll of voters in New Hampshire for the New Hampshire Primary showed that Hart’s support had dropped in half, from 32% to 17%, placing him suddenly ten points behind Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.

Duration : 0:5:35

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/10/05/Healthcare_Reform_The_Ethics_of_Public_Debate

Thomas H. Murray, president of The Hastings Center, says that while opponents of healthcare reform contend a public option would infringe on individual freedom, the reality is much more complex. Murray argues that a public option would promote liberty, ensuring all Americans are created equally.

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Panelists Thomas Murray, Peter Barland, Mary Ann Baily and Trudy Lieberman discuss the moral aspect of the current healthcare debate.

They examine the ethical issues involved in healthcare policy, the economics of health reform, the ethics of the way the debate is being conducted and reported, and physicians’ perspectives on these issues. – Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University

Thomas H. Murray is President of The Hastings Center. Dr. Murray was formerly the Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was also the Susan E. Watson Professor of Bioethics. He is a founding editor of the journal Medical Humanities Review, and is on the editorial boards of The Hastings Center Report; Human Gene Therapy; Politics and the Life Sciences; Cloning, Science, and Policy; Medscape General Medicine; Teaching Ethics; Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. He served as President of the Society for Health and Human Values and of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.

Duration : 0:3:15

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May 31, 1994 http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FChristopher-Hitchens%2Fe%2FB000APSKR0%3Fqid%3D1278211708%26sr%3D1-2-ent&tag=doc06-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

Watch the full program: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/08/christopher-hitchens-and-peter-hitchens_01.html

Comparison of the health care systems in Canada and the United States are often made by government, public health and public policy analysts. The two countries had similar health care systems before Canada reformed its system in the 1960s and 1970s. The United States spends much more money on health care than Canada, on both a per-capita basis and as a percentage of GDP. In 2006, per-capita spending for health care in Canada was US$3,678; in the U.S., US$6,714. The U.S. spent 15.3% of GDP on health care in that year; Canada spent 10.0%. In 2006, 70% of health care spending in Canada was financed by government, versus 46% in the United States. Total government spending per capita in the U.S. on health care was 23% higher than Canadian government spending, and U.S. government expenditure on health care was just under 83% of total Canadian spending (public and private).

Studies have come to different conclusions about the result of this disparity in spending. A 2007 review of all studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the US in a Canadian peer-reviewed medical journal found that “health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States, but differences are not consistent.” Life expectancy is longer in Canada, and its infant mortality rate is lower than that of the U.S., but there is debate about the underlying causes of these differences. One commonly-cited comparison, the 2000 World Health Organization’s ratings of “overall health service performance”, which used a “composite measure of achievement in the level of health, the distribution of health, the level of responsiveness and fairness of financial contribution”, ranked Canada 30th and the U.S. 37th among 191 member nations. This study rated the US “responsiveness”, or quality of service for individuals receiving treatment, as 1st, compared with 7th for Canada. However, the average life expectancy for Canadians was 80.34 years compared with 78.6 years for residents of the U.S.

The WHO’s study methods were criticized by some analyses. Some argue that Canada has had higher mortality rates for some conditions, such as heart disease, owing to the use of particular medications. Although there is a measure of consensus that life-expectancy and infant mortality mark the most reliable ways to compare nation-wide health care, a recent report by the Congressional Research Service carefully summarizes some recent data and notes the “difficult research issues” facing international comparisons.

The health care system in Canada is funded by a mix of public (70%) and private (30%) funding, with most services delivered by private (both for-profit and not-for-profit) providers.

Through all entities in its public-private system, the U.S. spends more per capita than any other nation in the world, but is the only wealthy industrialized country in the world that lacks some form of universal health care. In March of 2010, the US Congress passed regulatory reform of the American health insurance system. However since this legislation is not fundamental health care reform, it is unclear what its effect will be and as the new legislation is implemented in stages, with the last provision in effect in 2018, it will be some years before any empirical evaluation of the full effects on the comparison could be determined.

Health care costs in both countries are rising faster than inflation. As both countries consider changes to their systems, there is debate over whether resources should be added to the public or private sector. Although Canadians and Americans have each looked to the other for ways to improve their respective health care systems, there exists a substantial amount of conflicting information regarding the relative merits of the two systems. In Canada, the United States is used as a model and as a warning against increasing private sector involvement in financing health care. In the U.S., meanwhile, Canada’s mostly monopsonistic health system is seen by different sides of the ideological spectrum as either a model to be followed or avoided.

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Lew Rockwell states that during WW2, the income tax rate was so high
that employers used health insurance as an untaxed perk in order to
keep their most productive employees, and that Ronald Reagan put an end
to tax-free health insurance. 4/10/2010

Duration : 0:1:35

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Technorati Tags: Employer, free, HEALTH, INSURANCE, Lew, Libertarian, market, mckay, Michael, paul, Premiere_Elements_7, radio, Reagan, Rockwell, ron

Lost in the economic crisis, the lousy horserace numbers for McCain, and the personal attacks of the McCain camp is the ongoing health care crisis in the United States. With our current system, there remain 47 million without care and millions more who are underinsured. Cost issues exist alongside inequalities of care access. And now, with unemployment rising, the issue is becoming more acute.
Paul Krugman: Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (thats what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they havent been able to pull that off.

So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead. But but Not good. Obama’s idea is different. Today, he signed on to the Health Care for America Now principles, which do not endorse specific legislation, but are compatible with single payer and other approaches. From a press release:

Today, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) signed the Health Care for America Now statement declaring that he is on the side of quality, affordable health care for all and opposed to leaving Americans on their own with unregulated health insurance.

There’s still plenty of room to argue about the best way to get there, but with a recession looming and people in danger of losing their jobs, this is not an issue that can be ignored any more. Expect it to be brought up in the town hall debate tomorrow – unlike the phoney stuff being brought up by McCain’s campaign and his increasingly shrill VP candidate, who caters only to the shrinking Republican base, this is an issue that all Americans actually care about.

“Health Care for America Now’s goal this year is to get the next President and a majority of Congress committed to the principles of quality, affordable health care for all and opposed to policies that would tax our benefits at work and leave us on our own with the unregulated, bureaucratic private insurance industry,” said Richard Kirsch, National Campaign Manager, Health Care for America Now. “With Senator Obama’s signature, we are taking a major step towards getting the next President and Congress to make comprehensive health care reform a priority in 2009.”

John McCain’s plan is anything but acceptable. Since it’s all about saving money and nothing else, he proposes, according to the WSJ: McCain Plans Federal Health Cuts…Medicare, Medicaid Spending Would Be Reduced to Offset Proposed Tax Credit
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Sen. McCain’s senior policy adviser, said Sunday that the campaign has always planned to fund the tax credits, in part, with savings from Medicare and Medicaid. Those government health-care programs serve seniors, poor families and the disabled. Medicare spending for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30 is estimated at $457.5 billion.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/6/124346/441/758/621648

Those of us who analyze health policy and trends for a living have struggled to follow John McCain’s health plan through its many seemingly-improvised changes. First he was taxing health benefits through both payroll and income tax. Then he said he only intended to apply income tax, which meant that his plan would create even larger deficits. Now he says there won’t be deficits, because he’s going to make up the cost of those tax credits by slashing Medicare and Medicaid.

When a candidate suddenly, almost whimsically changes the way he proposes to handle $1.3 trillion – which is the amount of money his plan puts in play over the next ten years – it’s time to get nervous.

We already knew the McCain plan was going to cost most Americans money (in at least three different ways.) Now we know it could jeopardize their medical care when they get older, too. The end result of this off-the-cuff planning could change the way Americans receive, or don’t receive, medical care in this country…at least three kinds of health “tax increases” (more accurately described as increased personal cost) under the McCain plan: a “slow bleed” for people who retain coverage as the tax credit falls behind inflation, a $,7000-plus spike for people who lose their coverage immediately, and an increase in out-of-pocket costs (and denials, etc.) for people who still have insurance. What do we get in return? According to that neutral study, three million uninsured would gain coverage – briefly. After five years the number of uncovered would go up.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/mccains-erratic-health-st_b_132242.html

Duration : 0:10:47

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YES WE CAN! REAL HOPE FOR AMERICA!
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

Duration : 0:6:44

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YES WE CAN! REAL HOPE FOR AMERICA!
http://campaignforliberty.com

Duration : 0:1:41

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