Ezra Klein's getting happier with the Obama health care plan.
« Super Double Corrupt | Main | The Challenge »
Fake Right, Veer Left
06 Jun 2007 08:45 am
Comments (6)
From Jacob Hacker: Of course, many are eligible but not covered, and this brings us to what Obama can do to strengthen his plan. Obama should be talking much more about how he intends to sign people up for coverage who don’t have a tie to the workforce. He should also be pressed to say whether he really believes that having a separate insurance system for low-income Americans and children—in the form of Medicaid and S-CHIP—makes sense once such an effective national framework for secure coverage is created. And Obama needs to be much clearer about how he will cover the self-employed and early retirees.
Most of all, however, Obama should be reminded of a pithy lesson he no doubt learned in law school: Keep it simple. It shouldn’t take health policy wonks a week to figure out that Obama has actually proposed a bold break with present arrangements. And it shouldn’t require frenzied after-the-fact statements to make clear that Obama’s plan is based on an attractive bedrock principle: If you work or someone in your family works, you should have guaranteed coverage.
So now we have a the crux of the plan is an employee mandate, which seems to have been soft pedaled at the launch. Most policy experts seem to agree that's the less favorable option, especially in the new economy where employment is so much more fluid. It is also, it seems to me, politically the tougher sale, small business people always come off sympathetically in political fights, and they'll fight this.
In reference to fluid job market see this from the Obama Health care plan:
Participants in the new public plan and the National
Health Insurance Exchange will be able to move from job to job
without changing or jeopardizing their health care coverage.
Speaking of health care, I'd be interested to hear a liberal response to the interview in yesterday's WSJ with Arthur D. Levinson, Ph.D., CEO of Genentech. He made what seemed to me a strong apologia for his company's high drug prices.
"Ezra Klein's getting happier with the Obama health care plan."
No mention of how Ezra and Jon took down your anti-mandate argument?
-----
I don't think anyone is unhappy with Obama's plan compared to the status quo. The unhappiness comes when comparing Obama's plan to the Edwards' plan.
Klein would sell out his mother for socialized medicine. He cares about nothing else and does not consider the possible unintended consequences.
He is the definition of "special interest"
Comments closed June 20, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
He might be fully happy when Obama makes his plan universal. Right now it'll cover only two-thirds of the uninsured, according to Jon Cohn. That's not good enough.
Posted by david mizner | June 6, 2007 9:47 AM