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November 15, 2006
Hillary Care may leave her candidacy DOA
Did you hear? Hillary Clinton thinks the time is ripe to tackle the pressing issue of the age: the U.S. has better health care than the rest of the world, where socialized medicine ensures that everyone receives equally crappy care.
She ... said Democrats would focus on improving the quality and affordability of health care - a touchy matter for the former first lady, who in 1993 led her husband's calamitous attempt to overhaul the nation's health care system. The failure of that effort helped Republicans win control of both the Senate and House the following year.
"Health care is coming back,'' Clinton warned, adding, "It may be a bad dream for some.''
Jane Galt casts a skeptical gaze on the specter of Hillary Care universal health care; it sounds like Clinton may be ready to fix what ain't broke -- and in the process ruin her shot at the White House.
There are some serious constraints that I think would have to be considered by anyone trying to design a national health care package:
1) It cannot provide less, or less rapid, coverage than the typical American policy does now. Over three quarters of Americans are happy as clams with their health care now; to the extent that they support national health care, it is because they fear losing what they have.
Nationalisers, therefore, cannot sell a programme by guaranteeing them that they will lose some of what they have now. Horror stories aside, most Americans, despite their copays, have much more lavish coverage than that available elsewhere, with unfettered access to their doctors, semiprivate hospital rooms, expensive machines around every corner, and so forth.
In what other country would my eighty-eight year old grandmother have had her hip replaced two weeks after the doctor decided it was time? That two weeks being the period needed for my mother to arrange her schedule so she could take care of Mom.
That is the baseline of care, not whatever is currently on offer in France, no matter how fond the French may be of their system. Countries with national systems set them up a long time ago, when the median voter had no insurance at all, so whatever crap the government gave you was an improvement.
[...]
3) It cannot ration end-of-life care. The AARP is the most powerful lobby in America.
Anyone who thinks that a nationalised system will ration all those dollars poured down the drain in the last few months of life is engaging in fantasy -- a particularly ludicrous and risible fantasy because we already have nationalised health care for end-of-life care RIGHT NOW and we're spending like eighty shrillion dollars on it.
4) It will not cover immigrants, at least not until they are citizens. That means at least 12 million people will remain uninsured. It also means that emergency room usage will remain high, since that is where illegal immigrants tend to get their health care. Not that this really matters.
It doesn't seem to me that emergency room care for routine ailments is actually more expensive to provide than clinical care; it's just that hospitals price it to cover the cost of dead, uninsured trauma patients and so forth.
I don't see how a triage nurse, a doctor, and a waiting room are more expensive to provide because they're on the first floor than they would be on the fifth. But perhaps I'm missing something there.
No, Jane, I don't think you're missing a thing. There's nothing wrong with our healthcare system that Clinton can't make worse.
The comments following her post are chock-full o' heated debate; jump in -- the water's hot.
Posted by Mike Lief at November 15, 2006 12:34 AM
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Comments
Hillary won't win because from everything I've heard, she's a lesbian. She can drag that wussified husband around by the nose all she wants but I for one will never believe that she is anything other than a bull dyke who wants to put her hands in my wallet and take guns away from those of us who are packing below the waistline.
Posted by: Red at November 18, 2006 08:13 AM