Rove, Dean spar over healthcare exchanges

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/politics-elections/169071-rove-dean-spar-over-healthcare-exchanges

(snip)
The 2008 Democratic presidential candidate said he's one of the few Democrats who likes the recent McKenzie poll that found that more than 30 percent of businesses were likely to shift their workers onto health care exchanges starting in 2014. In making his comments, Dean said he agreed with Republican strategist Karl Rove's stated support for giving workers tax credits to buy insurance.

"The biggest thing we can do for small businesses is get them out of the healthcare business," Dean said. "If this bill does that, and all these small businesses dump their people into the exchanges, we will finally have broken the link between the employer and health insurance in this country ... That's going to help our business community more than anything else we've done in the past 25 years."

Despite calling for portable health insurance, Rove quickly sought to reframe the shift into exchanges as a looming catastrophe.

"What happens to the cost of the program when all of a sudden we don't have 24 million people in the exchanges, but we have 78 to 87 million?" asked President George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff. "You do the math… Howard looks at the (McKenzie) study and sees good things in it. I look at the study and I get scared."

Professionals will go where they are allowed to do their professional best and the market will follow them. "Health" "Care" run by bonus-minders will find itself bidding higher and higher, amidst staffing shortages, for enough staff to keep the doors open.