Mrs. Clinton presented a confident defense of her call for universal coverage, saying it reflected not only a moral imperative, but also the best chance to reduce costs and improve quality.
“I know that there are a lot of experts who may disagree about how to get to universal health care,” she said. “But they agree with me that in the absence of universal health care it’s very difficult to control costs, and it’s extremely hard to incentivize quality improvements at the level you need to really see results.” … Mrs. Clinton said she thought that “the time is right” to build a bipartisan consensus to reorganize the health system. She pointed to a growing demand for change by businesses, which bear the brunt of rising premiums, and to the support by some Republicans for a Senate bill that, like her proposal, would require individuals to buy policies and toughen regulation of the insurance industry.
“There is going to be increasing pressure, because left alone, we’re going to have more and more uninsured people and more and more underinsured people and continuing costs and decreasing quality,” she said.
Asked whether her proposal reflected the will of the entire country or just the leanings of voters in Democratic primaries, Mrs. Clinton said, “Well, I think it’s where the country can be.”
The proposal to cover all 47 million uninsured people would maintain the private insurance system and mandate coverage for all legal residents. She would require insurers to cover every applicant regardless of age or health status. Government insurance similar to Medicare would be available to all consumers. Refundable tax credits would help make the newly mandatory policies affordable for low- and middle-income workers. Small businesses would receive tax credits to encourage them to offer insurance to employees. Large companies would either have to offer health benefits or pay into a pool that would finance subsidized coverage.
Mrs. Clinton has pegged the cost of her plan at $110 billion. About half would come from savings generated by improvements in prevention, chronic disease management and electronic record keeping. The remainder would be produced by rolling back President Bush’s income tax cuts on people earning more than $250,000 a year. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign Web site says she would cover the uninsured “with no overall increase in health spending or taxes.” She said in the interview that rolling back the Bush tax cuts “should not be rightly labeled as a tax increase” because without Congressional action the cuts are to expire on Jan. 1, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/us/politics/28clinton.html
Tags: health plan, hillary, moral imperative, tax cuts
