The ever reliable Ezra wonks on the Clinton proposal. Here’s my bullet point synopsis:
- Allows you to keep your current plan
- Mandated coverage
- Opens the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program to everybody (the same health plan covering members of Congress)
- Creates a new public coverage option similar to Medicare
- Eliminates price discrimination by preexisting conditions and demographic characteristics
- Requires insurers to cover anyone
- Requires coverage portability
- Provides a refundable tax credit limiting the cost of insurance to a certain percentage of family income
- The employer tax deduction will now be limited to standard plans for middle-income, gold-plated “executive” plans can be taxed
- Creates a Best Practices Institute that will vastly accelerate the amount of research done and distributed on the cost-effectiveness of treatments
- Leaves SCHIP and Medicaid intact (why?)
- Leaves out global budgets and growth caps
On balance not a bad package. She leaves out some of the more divisive bits of the 1993 “Hillarycare” plan, like centralized budgets and caps. Things like that piss off her new BFFs in the insurance industry. It does offer some sorely needed insurance market reforms. It’s unclear to me how it will address the single most obvious defect of the current system; the friggin cost. We get the least bang for the buck in world and mediocre health outcomes.
Ezra has an update.
