Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Health Insurance Fear vs. Other Fears, Pt.4 -- Hacker's Plan

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The incremental strategy from private health insurance/care to single-payer, proposal by the Clintons in 1994 was doomed to fail for several reasons. The most obvious was the electorate's fear of change. But another big reason was that the “Cost containment was front-loaded (global budgets, managed care) and required total restructuring of the system,” as Mr. Klein points out. The plan scared people by introducing unfamiliar and untested concepts. Things like "managed competition" and changing current health insurance/care arrangements. Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker wrote a very successful book entitled “The Road to Nowhere” explaining the problems. One of his key points was that the health insurance/care proposal catered to the wrong audience, or as Mr. Hacker put it “Clinton had built a plan for wonks, not voters. They couldn't defend it in simple terms," It was going to involve “a complex set of changes for most Americans."

Mr. Hacker devised a plan to avoid the pitfalls of Clinton, as fashioned in his book. Both the Economic Policy Institute and the Campaign for America's Future have embraced his ideas. The Campaign for America's Future have promoted these health insurance/care proposals heavily to the candidates. All three candidates, Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have incorporated some of these ideas into their plans. However, it appears that, each of them have made some crucial and perhaps fatal political compromises along the way. There are just a few basic principles to Hacker's plan. The first one is the assurance that no one loses what they already have. If a person likes their current health insurance, they can keep it (barring their employer kicks them out of it).

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