What To Expect From Barack Obama's Health Policy
With the campaign heating up, and the financial markets melting down, the tenor of the campaign is shifting, more towards blame flinging and posturing. However, it wasn't that long ago before public health policy was one of the major talking points of the campaign in the media, when Barack Obama was running against Hillary Clinton.
With the caveat that whatever happens on this front is likely to be overshadowed by political and financial events, and that no health care plan ever survives contact with Congress, here's what to expect from the Obama Health Care Plan:
Obama's plan is incredibly vague on details. It promises to increase the rolls of people covered by health insurance by mandating that insurance companies not be able to restrict access for pre-existing conditions. To help the roughly 15% of the population that is not covered by health care afford it; his plan proposes subsidies for families to buy health insurance with.
Some of his larger claims are a bit harder to reconcile; his aim is to make sure that if people can't get insurance, they can get into the same sort of insurance program provided to members of Congress. This is difficult to parse, because he provides no mechanism in his plan for providing universal single payer coverage to American citizens.
His plan differs from Hillary Clinton's plan by not making purchase of health insurance mandatory to all citizens; this keeps the price down to about $130 billion per year, versus Clinton's proposal, which would tally up to $155 billion. (With the widely touted figure of 47 million uninsured, this plan will effectively cost roughly 2,800 per person covered, at taxpayer expense)
The real question on expectations, aside from the generalities of Obama's campaign trying to be all things for all people, is that with the United States economy teetering on a precipice of debt, and a 57 trillion dollar debt asteroid due to hit in the 2013 to 2020 time frame, is whether or not government mandated and subsidized health insurance makes much sense. The United States already provides insurance for three times the population of Canada, and the bills from those insurance programs are going to bankrupt Social Security and Medicaid in the next two decades.
Even so, every candidate has to make promises to win elections. Only time will tell if this health care plan will be a forgotten campaign promise, gutted by Congress, or simply tabled as fiscally unsound.
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