Senator Barack Obama has now released a more detailed look inside his vision for health care. The following look comes from the documentation provided from Obama’s Web site.

Why Do We Need It?
Obama points out that we spend 2 Trillion Dollars as a nation each year and yet 45 Million Americans (including 11 Million children) go uninsured in this country.

What it Does
First like the Clinton Plan Obama recognizes that costs are skyrocketing in large part because of obesity & chronic illness, along with waste and bad accounting due to not modernizing.

Obama has a three-part plan for health care:

(1) Providing affordable, comprehensive and portable health coverage for every
American.

(2) Modernizing the U.S. health care system to contain spiraling health care costs and
improve the quality of patient care.

(3) Promoting prevention and strengthening public health, to prevent disease and
protect against natural and man-made disasters.

So how does he propose to achieve these three goals?

To make health care affordable & available to everyone Obama proposes a strategy that he says will lower costs by about $2500 a year for every individual. To do that Senator Obama says we need to:

- Modernize the medical profession with Health IT investment, which will reduce unnecessary spending in the system that results from preventable errors and inefficient paper billing systems.
- Improve prevention and management of chronic conditions.
- Increase insurance industry competition and reduce underwriting costs and
profits, which will reduce insurance overhead.
- Provide reinsurance for catastrophic coverage, which will reduce insurance
premiums.
- Make health insurance universal, which will reduce spending on uncompensated
care.

Lets start with making insurance Universal. Obama sees a partnership between employers, private health plans, the federal government, and the states. Specifically the creation of a new federal insurance plan available to everyone who does not qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP or have access to insurance through their employers. This federal system which is in addition to Medicare/Medicaid can also be utilized by small business owners who want to offer insurance.

To pay for this, in addition to federal dollars (presumably), all corporations will either have to provide health insurance or pay into this plan. All children will be mandated to have health insurance either privately or through this plan, Also eligibility will be expanded for Medicaid & SCHIP. The Obama documentation gives no cost but you can imagine that they will add up. However there will be flexibility for states that already have plans or want to create them so individuals might receive state insurance instead of this national plan.

What kind of service will this provide? This new insurance plan will be similar to the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) and NO AMERICAN can be turned away if they want coverage. The plan “will include coverage of all essential medical services, including preventive, maternity and mental health care. Coverage will include disease management programs, self management training and care coordination for appropriate individuals.”

Individuals will be charged “fair” premiums and low co-pays, will get subsidies if they cannot afford this plan which they can also use to buy into private plans and will be able to move from job to job with this plan.

There will also be a National Health Insurance Exchanged described as:

The Exchange will act as
a watchdog and help reform the private insurance market by creating rules and standards
for participating insurance plans to ensure fairness and to make individual coverage more
affordable and accessible. Through the Exchange, any American will have the
opportunity to enroll in the new public plan or purchase an approved private plan, and
income-based sliding scale subsidies will be provided for people and families who need
it.

Some other notable things in this plan. Obama will allow Americans to important and purchase drugs from overseas, increase the availability of generic drugs by making it illegal for larger corporations to pay off smaller companies to keep them from entering the market, allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices thereby lowering them throughout the marketplace, eliminate the excessive subsidies to
Medicare Advantage plans and pay them the same amount it would cost to treat the same patients under regular Medicare & promote prevention.

Also in the plan “Obama will work with schools to create more
healthful environments for children, including assistance with contract policy
development for local vendors, grant support for school-based health screening programs
and clinical services, increased financial support for physical education, and educational
programs for students.”

Why Should We Support It?
Basically this is a similar plan to the first part of Senator Hillary Clinton’s. There are some pretty commonplace ideas here that are easy to support. Modernizing, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, eliminating waste, mandating that all children should receive health care, focusing in on prevention, opening up the generic drug market etc. There are lots of common sense approaches here

Why Shouldn’t We Support It
Simply put? We don’t know how much it will cost. Economists will undoubtedly start adding it up in the coming days but a new national program (in addition to Medicare, Medicaid etc.) is going to mean big $$$. Until we know how much that will be it is hard to judge.

You can get a sense though. The $2500 estimate of what the plan will save each individual is based in part on modernizing. Obama, like the Clinton plan, take the money they save from modernizing and prevention, ignore the money it will take to get modernized, trained etc. and to fund prevention programs, and claim a huge saving to the consumer which is used to justify spending more on a national program. This doesn’t actually work out. You get a national program that costs money and a series of things that could lower costs or could just provide slightly better service.

Will there be a national fund to help modernize the industry? If not how will health care provides fund this? Undoubtedly out of their own pockets which will also undoubtedly get passed back onto the consumer. That $2500 will instantly disappear once your bill reflects visits to nutritionists for prevention & to buy computer equipment.

We only have part 1 of the Clinton plan and I imagine by her third part she will get into this area. As such though I am harder on Obama’s plan here if Clinton’s contains something similar I will have to be hard on hers as well. Plain and simple this plan will cost taxpayers and companies (large & small) money. Undoubtedly lots of money.

There is also one other point. Obama makes mention that some of those uninsured Americans don’t have a health care plan because of the costs. The other part of that is that many of those Americans are in their twenties or early thirties. They have access to health care but take a risk because they are relatively healthy and would rather pocket the money. So you see the 45 Million statistic and think “this is a massive problem, something is broken”, but what is broken is human logic. The same with preventive care & obesity.

Funding this new program will in essence fund health care for many individuals who have the money and the opportunity but would rather decline health coverage.It will also promote prevention but makes no guarentee we as a nation will lose weight or live healthy lives. To do that a universal health program funded by the government would also need regulations taxing or banning fatty, sugary and calorie ridden foods along with alcohol & tobacco.

Bottom Line
There isn’t much substance to this plan. It has a lot of great ideas but if the burden is on the taxpayer, corporations & small businesses expect this plan to take a lot of money out of your & your employers pocket.

Related

See Hillary Clinton’s Health Care Plan Part 1