Saturday, June 05, 2004
Kerry: A healthcare plan for all Americans
Senator John Kerry has outlined part of his plan to get health insurance all Americans.
Kerry's plan seeks to attack the greatest cost of rising health insurance: catastrophic claims. These claims account for roughly 1% of all claims but approximately 20% of the costs.
From the cited article:
At the center of Kerry's ideas is his proposal to have the federal government reimburse employers 75 percent of medical bills over $50,000 that a worker runs up in a year. The reimbursement would, in effect, make the government a secondary insurer and ease costs for employers, workers and private insurers.
In exchange for the benefit, Kerry would require employers to offer insurance to every worker and to provide health programs that detect and manage chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure early enough to prevent the diseases from worsening.
Response from critics, including the Bush Campaign, is predictable:
Because he intends to pay for the voluntary program by rolling back President Bush's tax cuts for people earning more than $200,000, analysts such as Jack A. Meyer call it a "surcharge on the rich."
But the Kerry team as well as several independent analysis of the plan believe it will save the country as a whole billions of dollars:
Emory University health economist Kenneth E. Thorpe estimates the reinsurance program would save businesses and employees $288 billion in premiums over a decade but cost the government $257 billion because of administrative reductions. His computer model projects the catastrophic proposal alone would result in 3 million of the 44 million uninsured Americans getting coverage.
Hubbard and two colleagues calculate that for each percentage-point rise in the price of health insurance, the number of uninsured increases by 300,000.
Kerry's plan is the only new healthcare plan being proposed by either Presidential camp.
This would also offset the problems from the meager new jobs being created lately. Given that the sectors with the most job growth are in service and retail (low wage and no health insurance), this plan would at least offset the cost to some degree for middle to low wage workers.
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Kerry's plan seeks to attack the greatest cost of rising health insurance: catastrophic claims. These claims account for roughly 1% of all claims but approximately 20% of the costs.
From the cited article:
At the center of Kerry's ideas is his proposal to have the federal government reimburse employers 75 percent of medical bills over $50,000 that a worker runs up in a year. The reimbursement would, in effect, make the government a secondary insurer and ease costs for employers, workers and private insurers.
In exchange for the benefit, Kerry would require employers to offer insurance to every worker and to provide health programs that detect and manage chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure early enough to prevent the diseases from worsening.
Response from critics, including the Bush Campaign, is predictable:
Because he intends to pay for the voluntary program by rolling back President Bush's tax cuts for people earning more than $200,000, analysts such as Jack A. Meyer call it a "surcharge on the rich."
But the Kerry team as well as several independent analysis of the plan believe it will save the country as a whole billions of dollars:
Emory University health economist Kenneth E. Thorpe estimates the reinsurance program would save businesses and employees $288 billion in premiums over a decade but cost the government $257 billion because of administrative reductions. His computer model projects the catastrophic proposal alone would result in 3 million of the 44 million uninsured Americans getting coverage.
Hubbard and two colleagues calculate that for each percentage-point rise in the price of health insurance, the number of uninsured increases by 300,000.
Kerry's plan is the only new healthcare plan being proposed by either Presidential camp.
This would also offset the problems from the meager new jobs being created lately. Given that the sectors with the most job growth are in service and retail (low wage and no health insurance), this plan would at least offset the cost to some degree for middle to low wage workers.
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