Worried about Hillary's Health?

Of Interest to the sickly:


Hillary Clinton recently proposed a health insurance plan based on the "individual mandate" idea, which requires individuals to get health care or face a penalty. Also, employers would be forced to give their employees health insurance. Lower income people would receive federal support to pay for the health premiums, and the most impoverished would pay virtually nothing. Edwards supports an individual mandate plan that is somewhat altered, Obama doesn't support the individual mandate idea, but the only politician with experience in this area is Republican Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts helped pass a bipartisan health insurance "individual mandate" bill in April, 2006. As of July, 2007 all residents of Massachusetts were required to have health insurance by law, a step beyond other universal coverage schemes in Hawaii or Maine. The system is complex and not fully worked out. It doesn't seem as if anyone knows exactly what will happen if this centrist policy were implemented. The attraction of the plan is that it appeals to both banks of the Seine: the left will like it because it uses subsidies to help poorer folk, and the right wingers like it because it relieves the state of the cost of "health care moochers" who make taxpayers foot the bill for their emergency room adventures. Of course the Cato Institute says it's a slippery slope to full government health care, but is that true? States require all residents to have auto insurance, but there is no state-run auto insurance provider. We have to wait for more data from Massachusetts, I think. One other question is whether it would raise health insurance premiums because poorer people don't have to pay the full amount. That might be true.

And it doesn't solve the problem of those who are insured but are denied adequate care.

Article on Massachusetts Health Care