The Future of America's Health Plan: You Decide
The U.S. economic meltdown will deliver more ugliness to Americans in the coming months, including a speeded-up loss of health insurance as jobs disappear and employers cut back their employee benefits. So even if health care isn't top of the agenda right now, it'll be back, in worse shape than ever. There's nothing like an accurate side-by-side rundown to help us sort out the health care reform proposals of Senators McCain and Obama, and here's a link to a clear, detailed comparison, fresh from the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
In short, McCain's plan would:
- Eliminate state regulation of insurance companies, presumably including patient-rights laws.
- Allow for-profit companies to sell policies on a national basis, with fewer rules about what they must cover or how much risk the buyer would bear, on the assumption that competition, and less regulation, would make health care cheaper.
- Eliminate employer tax deductions for subsidizing employee health insurance. Instead, individuals would get a $2,500 yearly tax credit and families would get $5,000 to spend as they choose, on health insurance or not. (The current average cost of family health insurance, for the premium alone, is about $12,600 a year) There is no indication the credit would be adjusted for medical inflation.
- Insurers would keep the right to reject any applicants they regard as a risk. States would be responsible for health care for the uninsured, with unspecified federal assistance.
Obama's plan would:
- Add stricter oversight and regulation of the insurance industry.
- Require insurers to state what they spend on overhead and profit, and require some to spend at least 85% of premium revenue on actual health care (Some forms of insurance currently pay out only 50% and the other 50% goes to overhead and profit.)
- Require insurance companies to take all comers. Insurers could not reject individual applicants, as they do now, for even minor health conditions.
- Retain employer-based insurance, requiring large employers to either offer health benefits or pay into a national insurance fund. Small busineses would be exempt.
- Require all children to be insured, in part through expansion of the federal Childrens Health Insurance Program.