Article:Free-Market Wall Protects Insurers

Why, IMO, Kucinich the only candidate who really has a health-care proposal that makes sense.

(I support Edwards, but I disagree with him on this one.)

Free-Market Wall Protects Insurers, Not Your Health
by Pierre Tristam
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/18/5870/

Excerpt:

When I look at the major presidential candidates’ proposals on health care — Republican or Democratic, it makes no difference — what I see is fear and mendacity. The fear to take on the insurance industry’s lock on a preferential, inefficient and often ruinous system even for the insured; and the mendacity to suggest that feeding into that system by forcing more Americans into it will improve matters.

On the Republican side, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Mitt Romney all favor a mixture of tax credits and free-market dogmatism. So does Hillary Clinton, the leading Democrat, who’d make coverage mandatory. Barack Obama and John Edwards, the supposed liberal Democrats of the bunch, would make health insurance mandatory for most as well, but with a larger component of direct state subsidies. But Edwards is also into tax credits, and Obama has a blind spot for the uninsured.

The free-market approach assumes that health care is like shopping for sandals — that there’s enough health care products out there for competition to lower prices. Shoppers just have to find their deals. But health care is neither a luxury nor a consumer product. It’s an absolute necessity with limited choices. ...

...The answer runs into the ideological wall that’s been blocking the way to honest health care reform. When tax dollars are used to pay insurers, with you as the pass-through, which is what tax credits would do, that’s called “choice” and “market-based solutions.”

When tax dollars are used to pay your medical provider directly, skipping middlemen altogether, that’s called “socialized medicine.” And that’s the racket every major presidential candidate is buying into, rhetorically and substantially.