Another Voice / Health care
Clinton and Obama agree — and they’re both wrong
By Grace Marie-Turner
Updated: 04/21/08 6:33 AM
W iththe final Democratic primaries just weeks away, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are locked in a desperate battle for the nomination, and to highlight their differences they are exchanging blows over health reform almost daily.
Their principal debate? Whether the government should require everyone to have health insurance.
Clinton wants an individual mandate, creating legal penalties and even garnishing wages for those who don’t have health insurance. Obama doesn’t.
Clinton claims “universal” coverage is impossible if people are given the freedom to go uninsured. Obama argues that health insurance is still too expensive to force people to pay for it.
This debate has obscured the fact that — in almost every other area — the candidates have nearly identical visions and plans for health reform.
Both want to require insurers to accept all applicants. In addition, they would essentially force insurers to charge the same premium for everyone, regardless of age, gender, occupation or pre-existing conditions.
Both candidates want a national “pay or play” mandate, forcing employers to cover a preset percentage of their workers’ health insurance or pay a fine. Businesses with especially high insurance costs would be partially subsidized and small businesses would be offered new subsidies, at least at the beginning of the new program.
Both would massively expand Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. And they want to allow younger people to buy into Medicare, forcing private health plans to compete with this taxpayer-supported public insurance program that has federal policing authority and the ability to impose price controls — hardly a level playing field.
Both want to create a federal “comparative effectiveness” agency in which federal officials, not doctors and patients, would decide whether newer, more expensive medical technologies and pharmaceuticals would be more effective than their older and cheaper counterparts. The results of these clinical trials would inform what health plans will pay for.
Both want to give the government the power to dictate drug prices for medicines covered under the Medicare drug benefit. And they would both lift the ban on drug importation — effectively importing foreign price controls and surely decimating research to create tomorrow’s new medicines.
The list goes on. But the overriding principle for Obama and Clinton is clear — toward a much bigger role for the government over health care decisions. But that thinking is what caused many of the problems in our health sector today. Over-regulation is the main cause of the country’s health care woes.
What the insurance market actually needs is more competition — not more regulation.
Grace-Marie Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a nonprofit research organization focusing on free-market solutions to health reform.
