Letters to the Editor
Hillary cares and so do we
Feb 28, 2008 1:58 PM
When it’s time to vote you can always count on seniors. So it was no surprise that we were out there on Primary Day on Feb. 5 voting in greater numbers across the country than any of the other groups singled out for analysis by the political pundits.
It was the senior bloc vote in the Democratic primary that helped Hillary Clinton win here in New York and in the other states she won from coast to coast. But there was no final decision for the Democrats coming out of Super Tuesday.
Because the reasons that we had for endorsing Clinton are still critical, we must continue to support her candidacy in every way we can. Newspapers, magazines and talk shows frequently treat the policy differences between the two Democratic candidates as minimal. That is not the case.
The Clinton health care plan sets her profoundly apart from her opponent because her plan requires mandates. That means that her plan requires that everyone must choose coverage of some kind, either private or governmental.
While we’ve struggled to protect Medicare from endless end runs by the Bush administration to erode and finally destroy it — consider the $200 billion cuts to Medicare and Medicaid in the 2008 Bush budget and the failure to address the unfairness of the Medicare Advantage plans — our real hope has always been for a universal health care plan that would cover all Americans. But a health care plan that doesn’t include mandates is really not a universal plan. So if universal coverage is our goal, the Clinton plan is the only one that requires insurance for everyone.
It’s important that we take a very careful look at the critical difference mandates will make between the two plans and understand how that difference would affect millions of Americans.
Private insurance and government insurance — like Medicare — are offered by both plans so if you are happy with your coverage you will be able to continue with that coverage. And both plans offer affordable insurance to lower-income Americans. Where they part ways is over mandates.
Jonathan Gruber of MIT, a leading health care economist, finds that a plan without mandates will only cover 23 million of the presently uninsured at a cost of $102 billion per year. A similar plan with mandates would cover 45 million uninsured, almost double the unmandated plan, at a cost of $124 billion — no where near double the cost of the unmandated plan. The unmandated plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, and the Clinton mandated plan only $2,700.
The economics of these plans are important. As Paul Krugman notes in his Feb. 4 column in The New York Times that cited the Gruber findings, “That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently insured.”
Krugman also cited the results of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 2003 study comparing health reform plans that found that plans were more successful in covering the uninsured and in cost effectiveness when they included mandates.
He expressed concern that Clinton’s opponent had “demonized the idea of mandates” in a scare mailing that looks like the “Harry and Louise” ads of 1993 when the insurance lobby undermined what looked like a good chance of getting universal coverage at that time.
Krugman concludes that a Clinton victory in November provides the best chance to finally achieve universal health coverage. So it’s clear there are decisive differences between the health plans proposed by the Democratic contenders. Read the not-so-fine print in both plans and understand that the Clinton plan is our best hope to finally achieve universal coverage for all Americans.
In the meantime, we continue to roll up our shirtsleeves and fight for what’s important to us. To date we have sent close to 10,000 signatures to Sen. Harry Reid demanding that the “advantage” in the Medicare Advantage plans be eliminated so the playing field is level for all Medicare beneficiaries. We also had 600 volunteers “Calling for Hillary” in the run-up to Primary Day.
We could use your help in the months ahead as battles heat up in Congress and on the political battlefield.
