Sick Author Jonathan Cohn’s Expert Opinion on HillaryCare 2.0
Fills in some more details I find interesting, like using the government’s bargaining power to negotiate drug prices. How’s that for market based reform? Isn’t bargaining for price a central market behavior? The plan shelters small businesses from the cost of coverage for their employees:
Unlike Edwards and Obama, she does not ask of small employers what she’s asking of large employers: that they contribute to health insurance costs either by providing employees with coverage or paying a tax to help defray the cost of all those subsidies. Instead, she offers them a tax credit.
This turns a potential revenue source into an expenditure–which might not seem like such a hot idea at first blush. But campaign advisors put forward a plausible policy rationale. It goes like this: Many small employers really would struggle to bear the costs of such a mandate, even if they were adjusted to reflect firm size or income. But while a lot of individual small businesses would struggle with this, cumulatively the mandate wouldn’t generate that much money–so it’s a lot of pain for not a lot of gain. With a tax credit, which likewise wouldn’t cost much in the aggregate, those small employers who already offer coverage would have an easier time maintaining it–in keeping, again, with the idea of preserving coverage for those people who already have it.
I think this shows she has learned many of the political lessons of 1994 when small businesses strongly opposed Hillarycare 1.0. Maybe version 2.0 will fare better.
