Tag: Affordable Care Act

To Our Health. | On Daschle.

“‘Some may ask how at this moment of economic challenge we can afford to invest in reforming our healthcare system…I ask, how can we afford not to?” At the announcement of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle as HHS Secretary yesterday, President-elect Obama makes clear health care reform is still very much on the table despite the economic downturn, and is working with Congress to bolster health care provisions in the current stimulus package. “‘It’s hard to overstate the urgency of this work…It’s not something that we can sort of put off because we’re in an emergency,’ he said. ‘This is part of the emergency.’“

Among others, Senate health czar of sorts Ted Kennedy has applauded the Daschle pick. (Apparently, some of Daschle’s positions on health care reform are causing consternation in some corners. They sound alright by me.) “Exceptional challenges call for exceptional leaders, and Tom is an ideal choice to meet the urgent challenge of health reform. His integrity, intelligence, experience and commitment to the American people have won him friends and admirers on both sides of the aisle.”

Better Dead than Red.

“As political scientist Jacob Hacker has argued, the basic obstacle was nothing less than the government’s failure to have adopted a comprehensive health insurance plan decades earlier. As a result, the system that emerged by 1994 entailed such a crazy quilt of private interests — corporations, small firms, insurers, doctors, unions, HMOs, and so on — that moving all Americans into a new framework without worsening anyone’s situation had become virtually impossible.” Slate and Rutger University’s David Greenberg summarizes the history of health care reform, and of the epithet “socialized medicine.” “[T]he idea of government-run health care dates to the Progressive Era. Originally called ‘compulsory health insurance,’ it enjoyed favor in the 1910s among many quarters, including the American Medical Association…But as the debate heated up, doctors began to worry that it would hurt their incomes, and they banded with business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers to oppose reform. American entry into World War I tabled consideration of the issue, and the postwar Red Scare, Starr notes, ‘buried it in an avalanche of anticommunist rhetoric.’“

Insurance Ensured.

“‘We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance,’ Romney said in an interview. ‘And cars are a lot less expensive than people.’” In a new tack on ameliorating the problem of the uninsured, Massachusetts passes a law mandating that all citizens buy health insurance. “As simple as the idea sounds — buy insurance or else — the proposal is complex and, in some cases, still unfinished. For instance, it leaves the task of determining exactly how much some low-income residents will pay for their new, more affordable policies to a new agency that would serve as a liaison between the government, policyholders and private insurance companies.“