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A Truth and Two Lies about Healthcare Reform
by Bret Kincaid |
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First, as Palin evaded questions and garbled her syntax, she said something quite risky and necessary. After condemning the greed of Wall Street like a biblical prophet, she said: "We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt. Let's do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card. Don't live outside of our means. We need to make sure that as individuals we're taking personal responsibility through all of this." Rather than safely criticizing only Wall Street, she pointed to the widespread problem of personal responsibility for overspending and over-borrowing. Though many are victims (of predators or ignorance), plenty of people (including this writer) have not been good stewards of their personal finances. In such a gluttonous culture as ours, we need to keep hearing these prophetic words not just from our pastors but also from our political leaders. This is perhaps especially true as it relates to our personal health. Compared to our rich counterparts in Europe, we have one of the highest obesity rates in the world, if not the highest. And although we are not at the top in smoking or drinking rates, studies indicate that obesity is much more costly to the healthcare system than smoking or drinking. Indeed, at least one estimate puts the cost of obesity at almost 1 out of 10 healthcare dollars! This explains in part why the US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. (But higher usage rates of specialists and expensive medical technology explain much more of the gap.) Europeans seem to be doing a better job of delivering healthcare. Today, our healthcare system accounts for more than 1 out of every 7 dollars of the GDP-that's over $2 trillion. (Just to give you an idea of a trillion: imagine over 16,000 rail boxcars full of $1 bills!) We spend over twice as much per capita as our European counterparts for healthcare, and yet a much smaller proportion of our population enjoys stable healthcare coverage (47 million of us, for instance, are uninsured, and many millions of others are underinsured). We also have some of the poorest health indicators compared to other rich democracies-life expectancy, mortality rate, infant mortality rate-and, if we take non-Hispanic whites out of the US statistics, the indicators are much, much worse compared to the other rich democracies. These facts, however, are not due strictly (or perhaps even mostly) to poor health choices among individual Americans. They are also the result of the nature of our healthcare system. It is way overdue for substantial reform, and the next president will very likely try to move the football down the field on healthcare policy. McCain's and Obama's plans are predictably different in most details, but they are completely different in orientation. McCain plans to try to make markets work more efficiently and effectively by using tax credits among other market-based policy instruments. Although this may marginally decrease the number of uninsured by providing a $2,500 refundable tax credit ($5,000 per family) to make insurance plans more available (that is, beyond the employer-based plans) and affordable and to tax shelter more healthcare expenditures through Health Savings Accounts, his primary goal is not universal healthcare coverage, at least in the short term. Senator Biden, unfortunately, led debate watchers to believe that McCain's healthcare reform would result in 20 million currently insured citizens being dropped from the rolls. This may happen, but the likely result is that another 20 million or so currently uninsured will likely gain insurance coverage as well. In a giant step toward universal coverage, Obama proposes an admixture of market- and government-based policies to strengthen employer-based insurance coverage (through such things as tax credits for small businesses and partial reimbursement of catastrophic medical expenses) while increasing competition in the insurance industry by offering public plans alongside private insurance plans, as well as establishing an array of government requirements, for instance, that all children be insured (presently about 8 million are not). Not to be outdone by her Democratic opponent, Governor Palin wrongly called Obama's plan a "universal government-run program." At FactCheck.Org you can check out other lies and distortions coming from both candidates/campaigns as you try to clarify the truth. In the meanwhile, I invite you to examine both healthcare plans side-by-side. And as you do, you should also pay a visit to Faithful Reform in Healthcare to see what many Christian leaders think about what we should expect of our healthcare system and to read healthcare reform questions you can ask of congressional candidates running for office in your district. Back to Public Policy |
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