Sen. John Kerry has it right on health care. Unlike President Bush, he has pushed health care reform as a major issue in his presidential campaign. He wants government action without a government takeover.
Americans know from personal and often tragic experience that the problems in the health care system are mounting. Since Bush took office, health insurance premiums have been soaring, with double-digit percentage increases. Many workers worry that they will be forced to join the 3 million Americans who have lost their benefits since 2001. Many more can't get the care they need because higher deductibles and co-payments have made health care unaffordable. And all of us have reason to question the quality of the care we are receiving when we hear reports of medical mistakes leading to tens of thousands of deaths each year in U.S. hospitals.
Kerry has proposed bold, yet pragmatic, reforms. He would offer more opportunities for Americans to obtain coverage, stronger incentives for doctors to improve care and prevent mistakes, and public reforms to bolster private efforts to hold down costs and improve quality.
Kerry has learned from the mistakes of past Democratic initiatives. He would build on the strengths of the current job-based health care system and seek to eliminate its weaknesses, instead of trying to turn the whole system on its head.
Bush and the Republican Party are the ones with a radical agenda posing as moderate reform. Their proposals threaten job-based coverage. While both Kerry and Bush propose tax credits to make coverage more affordable, the president's plan would forbid workers from using the tax credits to get coverage at work. Instead, workers could only use the tax credits to buy insurance on their own at prices based on their health status. Although some uninsured workers would qualify for coverage in such a system, others would lose it. Healthy workers with job-based coverage could find cheaper individual policies, leaving their older and more frequently sick co-workers with higher insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-pays.
Kerry has seized the vital center between Bush's fend-for-yourself approach and a paternalistic Canadian-style single-payer system. His proposal is based on three mainstream ideas:
More choice: Kerry would use the Federal Employee
Health Benefits program, which serves members of Congress, as a way to expand choice and access to health care plans for all Americans. Individuals without coverage and businesses of all sizes could join.
More affordable coverage: Kerry aims to cover 95 percent of adults and 99 percent of children by making coverage more affordable.
He would provide targeted assistance to small businesses and low-income families and individuals through tax credits, Medicaid, and the
Children's Health Insurance Program. He would achieve near-universal coverage without a budget-busting universal entitlement.
Cost restraint, not price controls. Unlike Canadian-style spending caps and price controls that many Democrats proposed in the early 1990s, Kerry's approach uses public reforms to bolster private action. He would broadly deploy waste-reducing information technology, eliminate frivolous lawsuits and financial penalties on doctors acting in good faith, and improve care for people with chronic diseases by promoting the use of care management programs that are less expensive in the long run, because they reduce hospitalizations and other expenses that come with avoidable medical crises.
Kerry has opened the door to needed reforms that would enhance the best qualities of the U.S. health care system by delivering more services, more state-of-the-art technology, and more personal care by highly trained professionals -- without waiting lines. His approach would enable the advancement of other crucial reforms, such as faster development of cures for chronic diseases, an end to the separate and unequal status of low-income health care programs, and creation of medical courts for swift, reliable justice.
Kerry's bold and pragmatic agenda for reform proves that unlike Bush, he understands how much the nation needs change that improves its health care system without glossing over its failures.
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