posted on September 18, 2007 01:53:19 PM newHEALTH INSURANCE PROOF REQUIRED FOR WORK
by BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writer Tue Sep 18, 12:59 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that a mandate requiring every American to purchase health insurance was the only way to achieve universal health care but she rejected the notion of punitive measures to force individuals into the health care system.
"At this point, we don't have anything punitive that we have proposed," the presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We're providing incentives and tax credits which we think will be very attractive to the vast majority of Americans."
She said she could envision a day when "you have to show proof to your employer that you're insured as a part of the job interview — like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination," but said such details would be worked out through negotiations with Congress.
Clinton unveiled her health care plan Monday in Iowa, promising to bring coverage to every American by building on the current employer-based system and using tax credits to make insurance more affordable.
She told the AP she relished a debate over health care with her political opponents, including Republicans "who understood that we had to reform health care before they started running for president."
On Tuesday, Clinton began airing a 30-second ad statewide in Iowa and New Hampshire promoting her new health care plan. The ad reminds viewers of her failed effort to pass universal health care in the early 1990s, trying to portray a thwarted enterprise as one of vision.
"She changed our thinking when she introduced universal health care to America," the ad's announcer says.
The ad also highlights her support as senator for an expanded Children's Health Insurance Program and for more affordable vaccines.
Her health care plan would require every American to buy health insurance, offering tax credits and subsidies to help those who can't afford it. The mandatory aspect of her proposal, however, gets glossed over in the ad.
"Now she has a health care plan that lets you keep your coverage if you like it, provides affordable choices if you don't, and covers every American," the ad says.
The ad also continues her campaign's effort to appropriate the mantle of change away from rivals Barack Obama and John Edwards. The word change or its variations appears four times in the ad, which ends: "So, if you're ready for change, she's ready to lead."
Though her ads are airing in major markets in both states, they are appaearing with greater frequency in Iowa. Polls of voters in New Hampshire show her with a double digit lead over Obama and Edwards, but polls in Iowa show the three of them clustered together.
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.George S. Patton
posted on September 18, 2007 04:32:27 PM new
Gotta love the 'if you want to keep the ins. you have now, you can'. And just how long before she/they/any socialist/communists decided THAT will be the next change made to what she's now proposing????
Imo, the first thing that will happen is more and more employers will drop their ins. coverage for their employees. Cost savings and all. Then BIG BROTHER can take care of them too.
I also wonder IF the liberal MSM will be reporting on how high an income and the 25 year old age limit for what was originally meant to be for POOR CHILDREN only. Started out that way....and now we can see how they're pushing the income level all the way up to $82,000.00 now. I will always believe anyone making that amount can surely pay for their own insurance coverage.
When the subject of insuring ILLEGALS, under her plan was brought up, of COURSE she avoided that like the plague. Said THAT issue is still to be decided. Figures. No need to mention any issue in her plan that would turn the voters OFF from supporting it IF they knew ALL that will apply. And with MOST liberals supporting taxpayer funded health care for illegals....we KNOW already why she's avoided answer that question honestly.
While she's also falsely claimed this is NOT National health care......LOL LOL LOL....it surely is. And the yearly cost to taxpayers alone proves that.
I hope enough voters are sensible enough to see her plan for what it is - SOCIALISM. MORE Big Brother government growth....to the tune of AT LEAST $120 billion a year. And we KNOW it will be much higher than what she admits to.
posted on September 18, 2007 05:02:35 PM new
On Tuesday, all three network morning shows hosted Hillary Clinton as
a guest. In a set-up piece before the candidate's appearance, NBC's
Andrea Mitchell positioned Clinton's plan as in the middle: "There
will still be critics on both sides saying it does too much or too
little." But co-host Matt Lauer only confronted Clinton with
complaints that she wasn't liberal enough: "Critics are saying that this in some ways is the kind of plan you would have rejected back in 1993....Have you watered down reform?"
Lauer even suggested Clinton is too cozy with big business: "Some of your competitors are saying you've taken more money from the insurance industry than any other candidate, so the question is, is there a conflict looming on the horizon? Are you losing some of leverage in asking these insurance companies to get on board and make tough choices."
Clinton defended her liberal credentials, telling Lauer: "The insurance industry is not going to nominate me for Woman
of the Year."
---
MRC
[ edited by Linda_K on Sep 18, 2007 05:04 PM ]
IS THERE A TRIAL LAWYER IN THE HOUSE?
by Ann Coulter
September 19, 2007
The only "crisis" in health care in this country is that doctors are paid too little. (Also they've come up with nothing to help that poor Dennis Kucinich.)
But the Democratic Party treats doctors like they're Klan members. They wail about how much doctors are paid and celebrate the trial lawyers who do absolutely nothing to make society better, but swoop in and steal from the most valuable members of society.
Maybe doctors could get the Democrats to like them if they started suing their patients.
It's only a matter of time before the best and brightest students forget about medical school and go to law school instead. How long can a society based on suing the productive last?
You can make 30 times as much money as doctors by becoming a trial lawyer suing doctors. You need no skills, no superior board scores, no decade of training and no sleepless residency. But you must have the morals of a drug dealer. (And the bank wire transfer number to the Democratic National Committee.)
The editors of The New York Times have been engaging in a spirited debate with their readers over whether doctors are wildly overpaid or just hugely overpaid. The results of this debate are available on TimeSelect, for just $49.95.
"Many health care economists," the Times editorialized, say the partisan wrangling over health care masks a bigger problem: "the relatively high salaries paid to American doctors."
Citing the Rand Corp., the Times noted that doctors in the U.S. "earn two to three times as much as they do in other industrialized countries." American doctors earn about $200,000 to $300,000 a year, while European doctors make $60,000 to $120,000. Why, that's barely enough for Muslim doctors in Britain to buy plastic explosives to blow up airplanes!
How much does Pinch Sulzberger make for driving The New York Times stock to an all-time low? Probably a lot more than your podiatrist.
In college, my roommate was in the chemistry lab Friday and Saturday nights while I was dancing on tables at the Chapter House. A few years later, she was working 20-hour days as a resident at Mount Sinai doing liver transplants while I was frequenting popular Upper East Side drinking establishments. She was going to Johns Hopkins for yet more medical training while I was skiing and following the Grateful Dead. Now she vacations in places like Rwanda and Darfur with Doctors Without Borders while I'm going to Paris.
(Has anyone else noticed the nonexistence of a charitable organization known as "Lawyers Without Borders"?)
She makes $380 for an emergency appendectomy, or one-ten-thousandth of what John Edwards made suing doctors like her, and one-fourth of what John Edwards' hairdresser makes for a single shag cut.
Edwards made $30 million bringing nonsense lawsuits based on junk science against doctors. To defend themselves from parasites like Edwards, doctors now pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical malpractice insurance every year.
But as the Times would note, doctors in Burkina Faso only get $25 and one goat per year.
As long as we're studying the health care systems of various socialist countries, are we allowed to notice that doctors in these other countries aren't constantly being sued by bottom-feeding trial lawyers stealing one-third of the income of people performing useful work like saving lives?
But the Democrats (and Fred Thompson) refuse to enact tort reform legislation to rein in these charlatans. After teachers and welfare recipients, the Democrats' most prized constituency is trial lawyers. The ultimate Democrat constituent would be a public schoolteacher on welfare who needed an abortion and was suing her doctor.
Doctors graduate at the top of their classes at college and then spend nearly a decade in grueling work at medical schools. Most doctors don't make a dime until they're in their early 30s, just in time to start paying off their six-figure student loans by saving people's lives. They have 10 times the IQ of trial lawyers and 1,000 times the character.
Yeah, let's go after those guys. On to nuns next!
But Times' readers responded to the editorial about doctors being overpaid with a slew of indignant letters -- not at the Times for making such an idiotic argument, but at doctors who earn an average of $200,000 per year. Letter writers praised the free medical care in places like Spain. ("Nightmare" in the Ann Coulter dictionary is defined as "having a medical emergency in Spain."
One letter-writer proposed helping doctors by having the government take over another aspect of the economy -- the cost of medical education:
"If we are to restructure the system by which we pay doctors to match Europe, which seems prudent as well as inevitable, we must also finance education as Europeans do, by using state dollars to finance the full or majority cost of higher education, including professional school."
And then to reduce the cost of medical school, the government could finance "the full or majority cost" of construction costs of medical schools, and "the full or majority cost" of the trucks that bring the cement to the construction site and the "the full or majority cost" of coffee that the truck drivers drink while hauling the cement and ... it makes my head hurt.
I may have to see a doctor about this. I should probably get on the waiting list now in case Hillary gets elected.
That's how liberals think: To fix an industry bedeviled by government controls, we'll spread the coercion to yet more industries!
The only sane letter on the matter, I'm happy to report, came from the charming town of New Canaan, Conn., which means that I am not the only normal person who still reads the Times. Ray Groves wrote:
"Last week, I had the annual checkup for my 2000 Taurus. I paid $95 per hour for much needed body work. Next month, when I have my own annual physical, I expect and hope to pay a much higher rate to my primary care internist, who has spent a significant portion of his life training to achieve his position of responsibility."
Said THAT issue is still to be decided. Figures. No need to mention any issue in her plan that would turn the voters OFF from supporting it IF they knew ALL that will apply. And with MOST liberals supporting taxpayer funded health care for illegals....we KNOW already why she's avoided answer that question honestly. 
