Katrina Vanden Heuvel: The State of Healthcare (The Nation)

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BLOG | Posted 01/23/2007 @ 5:12pm
The State of Healthcare


According to the Bush administration, the new health care plan that the President unveiled in the State of the Union address Tuesday would cover three million people who are currently uninsured. Three million – out of forty-seven million. After years of dangerous inaction, this is what Bush rolls out to address a grave and growing crisis!

And, of course, no Bush domestic proposal would be complete without a further gutting of the social compact – this time, "cutting Medicaid payments to public hospitals and other ‘safety net' providers by $3.9 billion over the next five years." As Deborah Bachrach, a deputy commissioner in the New York State Health Department, told the New York Times, this cut would impact hospitals "that serve some of the lowest-income, most vulnerable patients." This at a time when many such facilities are already struggling to survive.

The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy survive untouched – in fact, they receive a new deduction if they purchase their own plans. However, the continuing War on the Middle Class is being…well, escalated. Workers who, according to the President, "choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans" through their employers will be taxed, while those who buy plans on their own will receive a deduction. As Columnist Paul Krugman suggested in a Times op-ed, who in our nation has one of those gold-plated plans? Krugman goes on to write, "The uninsured don't need an ‘incentive' to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible…. Mr. Bush…is still peddling the fantasy that the free market, with a little help from tax cuts, solves all problems."

"The President's so-called health care proposal won't help the uninsured, most of whom have limited incomes and are already in low tax brackets," said Democratic Representative Pete Stark, Chairman of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. "But it will hurt middle-income Americans, whose employers will shift even more cost and risk to their employees."

And as Gerald Shea, assistant to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O, told The Times, "It would throw into turmoil the employment-based system of health insurance, and it would impose a new tax on the middle class."

Most experimentation (both good, not-so-good, and bad) with health care policy is happening at the state level. The often-touted Massachusetts plan – in the words of Doctors Steffi Woolhandler and David Himmelstein of Cambridge Hospital and Harvard Medical School – "offers empty promises and ignores real – and popular – solutions." By requiring every resident of the state to have health insurance or pay a fine while doing nothing to control costs of insurance and care, or setting standards for coverage – Big Insurance wins, and consumers lose. And the middle-class which doesn't qualify for subsidies but can't afford insurance is further squeezed. ....(more)

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?pid=159864