Clinton’s healthcare proposal
*Disclaimer: This post should in no way be taken as an endorsement for either Democratic candidate. My disgust of our two-party system generally compels me to steer away from the Democrats, whom I tend to think deserve just as much criticism and ire as the Republicans receive from so-called “liberals”. (I also hate the term “liberal” and believe it is wrongly applied in the United States on the basis of our mangling of its actual definition.) I mean, hooray that Clinton and Obama are running, but I can’t say I’m super thrilled about their stances on the issues of importance.
Clinton has received much flak in the media and from her chief rival, that cutie pie Barack Obama, for her extremely detailed healthcare plan on the basis that it requires all Americans to purchase health insurance of some kind or another. FORCING people to have health insurance is just awful, isn’t it? Jeezy chreezy, what a bitch. The general line of reasoning that I’ve heard is that it wouldn’t work, it would be enormously detrimental to the millions of people who aren’t on insurance because they can’t afford it in the first place, and it would end up penalizing the poorest of the poor (as if we don’t already do plenty of that in our society). I’m surprising myself by even saying this, but…I think she may be onto something.
Mainly, I think the unintended consequences of requiring everyone to obtain healthcare coverage could be twofold, and could have potentially mind-bogglingly progressive ramifications for our society.
1. Clinton has heavily drawn from the efforts of policymakers in Massachusetts in creating this healthcare plan (at least that’s what they said on NPR). Massachusetts requires everyone to have health insurance, and they haven’t erupted into a cesspool of fist-pumping Socialists as of yet. One of the major surprises in Massachusetts during the first year of the implementation of this plan, however, was that they discovered far more people needing health insurance–needing subsidized health insurance, such as Medicaid or other programs at least partially paid for by the state–than they had anticipated when drawing up the proposal. The reason for this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone: there are way more poor people in the United States than the government counts. In fact, even middle-class families have a difficult time with health insurance. I know a young family with a solid middle-class income who can’t afford to insure their two children, for instance. Because the plan would be forced to subsidize healthcare coverage for those people whose incomes wouldn’t allow an independent purchase of insurance (thus essentially expanding already existing programs such as Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program), the sheer number of poor families would be finally uncovered. In my utopian vision, this uncovering leads to a chain reaction: the government finally realizes that there are way more poor people than they have been counting, that Medicaid and public assistance programs are vastly underutilized by people who are eligible for them, and they’re going to have to do something about it; the government then decides to expand Medicaid and SCHIP to include those people; the expansion of Medicaid would compel healthcare providers other than public hospitals and community health centers to start accepting Medicaid; the private insurance companies get huffy and have to drastically lower rates in order to make their astronomical HMOs seem attractive to healthcare providers by comparison; eventually, the private insurance companies are weakened and some serious talk of universal healthcare provision, provided by the state and subsidized by both government and taxpayers who can afford it, begins. And we all become fist-pumping Socialists. Break out the vodka, comrades.
2. Realistically, another fantastic possible consequence (probably entirely unintended by Clinton) is that the uncovering of the millions of Americans lacking health insurance and unable to buy their own would finally force the government to raise that goddamn poverty line. Every year the federal government sets a cost-of-living standard by which “poverty” is determined and the number of poor people are counted; the “federal poverty line” is then used to determine eligibility for public assistance and a host of other programs. It’s ridiculously low, as you can see here. The problem is that, although many politicians like to play the populist card and rant about the minimum wage and families struggling to get by, no one will actually do the right thing once they’re in office and redefine the federal poverty guidelines. The reason for that is simple: they would be committing political suicide, and no politician who’s made it as far as the White House has the moral wherewithal to do the right thing in this regard. What would happen if the guidelines were reevaluated and the FPL raised would be that, suddenly, millions more Americans would be classified as “poor” and even working families might qualify for government assistance, etc. Beyond the obvious fact that no politician wants to go down in history as the President who saw the number of poor people quintuple, this reevaluation would force some pretty major changes in our society that would be fundamentally opposed by our class system and those in power. We’d actually have to pay people a living wage, for one; we would have to heavily subsidize education; we’d either have to create more jobs, bring jobs back from overseas, or make service jobs such as McDonald’s capable of supporting a family; we’d have to pay attention to poor people, for once, and those are harsh realizations that call into question the very nature of our society itself.
I don’t think for one second that Clinton’s healthcare proposal as it stands now will ever be implemented–at least not in my lifetime. If she does make it to office, which at this point seems unlikely, she would face a Congress full of people (yes, even other Democrats) who are publicly opposed to the plan. That requirement bit really puts people off. We Americans like our goddamn choices. That is, we like for certain Americans to have choices. For instance, many of us don’t care if women have choices, but that’s beside the point. You require me to do something and I might choose to exercise my right to kick your ass.
It’s a shame. Sometimes we seem so far away from the things that make the most sense for our country–for any country, for that matter. Universal healthcare is one of those things that Americans still aren’t ready to accept as a right; we call them benefits instead, and consider quality, comprehensive healthcare a privilege granted the few rather than an entitlement granted on the basis of your humanity. Seems pretty ludicrous, doesn’t it, for a nation that supposedly cares so very deeply about human life.
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February 26th, 2008 at 2:30 am
I’m interested to know your opinion of “Sicko” now?
February 29th, 2008 at 11:22 am
It baffles me that the are healthcare institutions that do not accept medicare. That said, the whole doing what’s right/making money cul-de-sac is something that I hope to never get cought in. It is clear to me however, that the people who are running medicare are either low-balling healthcare institutions to save money, or simply passing the burden of the poor off to people most of whom are being pretty selfless in the first place.