Guaranteed Healthcare

There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton unleashed her healthcare plan with a better pr campaign than any other candidate…just as there’s no doubt that many of the plans being pushed by politicians look alike.

We’ll take a look at where the healthcare debate has gone since Hillary turned the heat up...

Consumer advocate Jamie Court argues that we’re criminalizing patients and enriching insurers] by mandating the purchase of insurance:

The average health insurance premium for a family of four is just over $12,000. What middle-class family making, say, $60,000 per year can afford that bill, much less the deductibles and copays to follow?

Blogger Bookgrl counters that Hillary Clinton’s plan is a back-door end-around way to achieve guaranteed, single-payer healthcare:

Hillary's plan ensures that private insurance companies will have to compete with one of the most successful government programs you've never had access to before. ..To me, the understated Medicare opt-in is all that really matters.  It's a path to single or quasi-single payer healthcare if ever there was one.

Paul Krugman on the other hand doesn’t think Clinton’s plan—and all the ones that are similar to it--will lead to single-payer healthcare, but he does think it’s the best we’re gonna get:

These plans may disappoint advocates of a cleaner, simpler single-payer system. But it’s 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.

Barbara Ehrenreich agrees ClintonCare won’t be the stepping-stone to single-payer…and suggests we gird our resolve and steel ourselves rather than give in so quickly:

Bow your heads and raise the white flags. After facing down the Third Reich, the Japanese Empire, the U.S.S.R., Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, the United States has met an enemy it dares not confront -- the American private health insurance industry.

With the courageous exception of Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic candidates have all rolled out health "reform" plans that represent total, Chamberlain-like, appeasement.

…Fellow citizens, where is the old macho spirit that has sustained us through countless conflicts against enemies both real and imagined? In the case of health care, we have identified the enemy, and the time has come to crush it.

For context on the healthcare crisis, a new report finds it’s worse than we thought: one-third of U.S. residents under age 65 have been without health insurance for some period over the last two years.  Yikes.  And the Wall St. Journal, evangelists of the free markets, reports a poll finding that 65% of the American public wants the government to guarantee healthcare…as happens in single-payer systems succeeding around the world.