{"id":71,"date":"2007-09-21T10:43:40","date_gmt":"2007-09-21T15:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kim.thewei.com\/20070921\/dem-candidates-present-a-reasonable-health-care-reform-package\/"},"modified":"2013-12-13T08:15:32","modified_gmt":"2013-12-13T13:15:32","slug":"dem-candidates-present-a-reasonable-health-care-reform-package","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/dem-candidates-present-a-reasonable-health-care-reform-package\/","title":{"rendered":"Dem candidates present a reasonable health care reform package"},"content":{"rendered":"

Senator Clinton delayed a long time before coming out with her own healthcare<\/em> plan . . . Still, this week she did deliver a plan, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s as strong as the Edwards plan \u00e2\u20ac\u201d because unless you get deep into the fine print, the Clinton plan basically is the Edwards plan . . . <\/p>\n

The Edwards and Clinton plans as well as the slightly weaker but similar Obama plan achieve universal-or-near-universal coverage through a well-thought-out combination of insurance regulation, subsidies and public-private competition. These plans may disappoint advocates of a cleaner, simpler single-payer system. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to see how Medicare for all could get through Congress any time in the near future, whereas Edwards-type plans offer a reasonable second best that you can actually envision being enacted by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president just two years from now.<\/p>\n

To get there, however, would require overcoming a lot more fear.<\/p>\n

There won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be a serious Republican alternative. The health care plans of the leading Republican candidates, such as they are, are the same old, same old: they principally rely on tax breaks that go mainly to the well-off, but will supposedly conjure up the magic of the market. As Ezra Klein of The American Prospect cruelly but accurately puts it: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Republican vision is for a world in which the sick and dying get to deduct some of the cost of health insurance that they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get \u00e2\u20ac\u201d on their taxes.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

But the G.O.P. nominee, whoever he is, won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be trying to persuade the public of the merits of his own plan. Instead, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll try to scare the dwindling fraction of Americans who still have good health insurance by claiming that the Democrats will take it away.<\/p>\n

Jump to full New York Times op-ed<\/a> piece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Senator Clinton delayed a long time before coming out with her own healthcare plan . . . Still, this week she did deliver a plan, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s as strong as the Edwards plan \u00e2\u20ac\u201d because unless you get deep into the fine print, the Clinton plan basically is the Edwards plan . . . The … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Dem candidates present a reasonable health care reform package”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-trade"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4590,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/4590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewei.com\/kimi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}