Ezra Klein hits the Obama campaign for a short-sighted attack on the Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal. The campaign is sending out a mailer (above) that, as Klein points out, is remarkably similar to the Harry and Louise ad (below — both images are from Klein’s blog) the insurance industry ran in the early 1990s to squash what Hillary Clinton’s task force was proposing.
Here’s what Klein has to say:
The Obama campaign kept their hairstyles and barely even changed their clothing — which is really quite unfair to Harry and Louise, who probably let go of the plaid years back. What’s worse is that the argument they’re making is applicable to any kind of universal health care arrangement, including the arrangements Obama himself will eventually have to adopt:
An “automatic sign-up,” a la Medicare, would still force Americans into health care they may not want to pay for, or may feel overburdened by. Some seniors feel overburdened by Medicare’s cost-sharing now. Meanwhile, Obama not only has a mandate for kids in his own health care plan — what if the parents can’t pay, one might ask? — but he said, in last night’s debate, “If people are gaming the system, there are ways we can address that. By, for example, making them pay some of the back premiums for not having gotten it in the first place.” That, of course, is exactly what a mandate does. Gaming the system, in this context, means not purchasing health care. And Obama is now threatening to force them to pay back premiums. That’s a harsher penalty than anything Clinton has proposed.
The key, as he points out in another post on the Urban Institute’s report on health care mandates, is that you can’t achieve universal coverage without some form of mandate. Otherwise, you create a tiered system with the poor being served by Medicaid, the rich buying their own Cadillac care and the rest left to fend for themselves without any recourse.
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Hank Kalet 