The Next Worst Thing

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Senator Kerry is out on the campaign trail trying to convince voters that while he wants government to run more of America’s health care system, he doesn’t support government-run health care. “I want to make it very clear what my health care plan is and what it isn’t. My health care plan is not a government plan,” Mr. Kerry told voters at a Toledo senior center. This must be more of Mr. Kerry’s famous penchant for nuance that’s nonsense. “Clearly, it is a government-run health plan,” the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, Michael Cannon, told us.


First, Mr. Kerry proposes expanding eligibility for government-run health care, which has the effect of crowding out private insurers. The Kerry campaign estimates that 18 million persons will be newly insured under the senator’s plan. But according to the Rand Corporation, for every person newly insured under an expansion of Medicare, there’s another person who drops his private insurance – or gets dropped by his employer – to take advantage of the public program. Findings of economists Susan Marquis and Stephen Long, Rand reports, “suggest that about 50 percent of those who newly participated in the public program substituted public insurance for private insurance.”


So what the Kerry campaign hasn’t told voters is that Mr. Kerry’s plan will also cover an additional 18 million persons who would otherwise purchase private insurance – at a cost to the taxpayers of $300 billion over 10 years, according to Mr. Cannon.


Second, Mr. Kerry wants the government to take over the catastrophic health insurance business. For large corporations, the government would assume 75% of the costs of all claims in excess of $50,000. So the government would be in the position of deciding what gets covered and what doesn’t – even for claims below the cost threshold, in order to prevent fraudulent claims from exploiting the government subsidy. Mr. Kerry’s plan “layers a Medicare-like bureaucracy on top of private health insurance,” according to Mr. Cannon.


Mr. Kerry’s plan may not be an all-out government takeover, but it “sows the seeds for greater government control over the health care system,” Mr. Cannon told us, because it would “further remove patients from the cost of the care they receive.” As prices continue to escalate, pressure would mount for Clinton-style universal health coverage.


Mr. Kerry has been playing up his support for health care “choice” on the stump, but there’s not much of it in his plan. “There is little talk in the Kerry plan about individuals having control over their own choices,” the president of the Galen Institute, Grace-Marie Turner, has written. “The words consumer choice and Health Savings Accounts don’t show up in any of his health proposals that I could find.”


Mr. Kerry has derided the health savings accounts supported by President Bush because they “will benefit the wealthy,” according to the senator’s campaign Web site. But health savings accounts have been available since January, and provide coverage to tens of thousands of Americans. An Internet-based insurance brokerage, eHealthInsurance, found that, in the first six months of the year, 41% of its customers who purchased health savings accounts had incomes of $50,000 or less. Health savings accounts are not only making health insurance affordable for more Americans; they also begin to address the incentives that lead to ever-higher health care prices. Mr. Kerry, however, wants to take America’s health care system in the other direction. “It’s not quite socialized medicine,” Mr. Cannon told us, “but it’s the next worst thing.”

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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