Campaign Desk
Huckabee on Health
How about some details, Mike?
By Trudy Lieberman Wed 12 Dec 2007 09:58 AMCandidate Mike Huckabee walked into the Oscar Frazier Community Center in Bluffton, South Carolina, the other day and charmed a crowd of AARP members with his easy manner and string of jokes emblematic of his campaign. When the talk turned to health care, the Island Packet reported that Huckabee “urged a revolutionary overhaul of the country’s health care system,” saying that a “Humpty-Dumpty philosophy” of waiting until Americans fall off the wall before insurance will pay is “insanity.” He likened America to “an NFL football game on Sunday afternoon. There are plenty of people down on the field in desperate need of rest, but several thousand in the stands are in desperate need of exercise.”
By revolutionary did Huckabee mean marching fans down to the field and ordering them to run between the goal posts? The Island Packet, a McClatchy newspaper serving South Carolina’s coastal counties, didn’t amplify much for its readers other than to say that Huckabee “supports a preventive approach that would empower Americans to design their own health insurance plans with provisions that pay for nutritionist visits or gym memberships.” Well and good, but does that mean turning ordinary folks into actuaries as they run off to diet consultants and personal trainers?
According to The Wall Street Journal, such vagueness and ambiguity may be just what the candidate wants, and when journalists don’t pin him down or do a little digging on their own to offer more meat, they play right into the campaign script. In an illuminating piece, the Journal described Huckabee’s MO as giving boilerplate summaries of his beliefs and then moving “ever so swiftly on to the next question.” It’s when he’s pressed for details,” the paper wrote, “that things get dodgy.”
Indeed they do. The New Hampshire Business Review tried pressing Huckabee and the other Republican candidates for details on a variety of issues. Health care was first on the list. It asked for only 150-word summaries, barely enough to telegraph the headlines of their proposals but perhaps sufficient for readers to get a whiff of where they would go if elected. Huckabee (along with Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuilani) refused to respond “despite repeated requests,” the Business Review wrote.
For the record, here’s what Huckabee’s “revolutionary” overhaul of the system would do. The Kaiser Family Foundation, which has compiled summaries of all the candidates’ health care proposals, says he would use tax deductions and tax credits to encourage people to buy private insurance on their own and encourage other market-based solutions to problems of cost and access. President Bush supported this approach during the last campaign. Other Republicans do now. Huckabee opposes “universal health care mandated by federal edict.” His plan has no provision to expand public programs like Medicaid, doesn’t call for subsidies to employers to help them buy policies for their workers, and calls for no insurance pooling arrangements to make it easier for sick people to get coverage. But he wants to make health-savings accounts more available and allow states to act as laboratories for market-based approaches to coverage. This is a policy, but not a revolutionary one.
How much more useful the Island Packet’s story would have been had it summarized Huckabee’s proposals for readers instead of letting him rattle on about a health-care revolution that isn’t.
CJR
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monicalee![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Thu 13 Dec 2007 09:48 AMInteresting--infuriating, even--that none of the candidates want to address health care issues in terms of health care provider GREED. Where is the suggestion that sky-high profits just might have a correlation with sky-high costs? Not one of them, Republican or Democrat, has even whispered that obscene profits among drug companies and providers is killing our health care system. We don't need to see commercials about prescription drugs, for instance. I trust my doctor and leave it to him to know what's best for me. How many billions of dollars could be saved if the drug companies lost their ability to seduce us with visions of seemingly healthy, happy actors?
It's all about the money. It's always all about the money. We're watching our precious country slowly self-destruct and nobody has the stomach to follow the money.
padikiller![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Fri 14 Dec 2007 10:38 PMIf a homeless bum collapses in front of a 7-11 anywhere in America...
What happens?...
An ambulance comes and picks him up... For FREE... Takes him to an ER for FREE.... where on the front door there is a sign informing the bum of all of his rights to FREE medical care.... The doctors at the ER diagnose and stabilize him for FREE (including feeding, bathing, clothing, medicating and housing him as necessary)...
If the bum has no other access to medical care (private insurance, Medicare, VA, or state benefits) then the bum qualifies for Medicaid and gets a universal health care plan, courtesy iof US taxpayers, that gives him access to nearly every hospital in the U.S. and nearly every state-of-the-art prescription medication that the pharmaceutical companies have risked BILLIONS of dollars to bring to market..
This is REALITY here, moonbats...
Deal with it...
AhmNee![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Mon 17 Dec 2007 02:34 PMI'm wondering what your point is here, Padi? That the poor don't deserve healthcare or medications?
Or do you want us to cry for the plight of the Pharmaceutical companies and their "risk" at bringing new absurdly overpriced, under tested drugs to market.
Maybe you're just enlightening us that you've forgotten about the "ounce of prevention vs. a pound of cure" addage? If the only way to receive healthcare is to have a life threatening collapse, of course it's going to cost more than having healthcare in place to catch early symptoms of larger problems and get them treated before they become life threatening.
padikiller![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Tue 18 Dec 2007 12:06 PMThe POINT is that poor people in the United States get the BEST medical treatment and medications in the world at the expense of American taxpayers.
Our profit-driven health care system produces the new drugs and therapies that save millions of lives around the world...
AhmNee![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Wed 2 Jan 2008 09:38 AM"Our profit-driven health care system produces the new drugs and therapies that save millions of lives around the world"
Cool. Then the government can stop throwing out breaks and subsidies to the pharmaceutical companies and the FDA can actually look at the drug testing objectively so the drug manufacturers will stop putting out drugs that kill people. That would be great.