Mr. Clinton’s crisis - Bill Clinton’s misleading arguments for reforms to end the alleged health care crisis in the US - Editorial
Categories: Health Care Jobs“I KNOW there are people here who say there’s no health-care crisis,” said President Clinton in his State of the Union address. “Tell it to Richard and Judy Anderson.” Richard Anderson, Mr. Clinton related, lost job and insurance, his wife had a cerebral aneurysm, bills piled up to $120,000, and the Andersons were forced into bankruptcy.
This is a genuinely sad story. But it is neither evidence of a “crisis” nor reason to support the Clinton plan. First, Judy Anderson recovered. Indeed, she got first-rate care despite lacking insurance. Emergency rooms provide care to all comers, and non-profit hospitals–88 per cent of all U.S. hospitals –must by law take any patient needing care. The Andersons’ problem wasn’t with care but with insurance.
Second, the insurance trouble could have been eased by enhancing the “portability” of coverage between jobs–a simple reform that President Clinton would oppose if it were voted on tomorrow. Why? Its salutary effect would undermine sentiment for his more grandiose designs.
Third, according to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the London Sunday Telegraph, the Andersons are a bad example. Mr. Evans-Pritchard writes that the hospital where the operation was performed has a $2- to $3-million fund for hardship cases that the Andersons eschewed. “They declared bankruptcy almost immediately, which allowed them to clear older debts that had nothing to do with the illness.”
So we can tell the Andersons there’s no crisis. How about “the 58 million Americans who have no coverage at all for some time each year”? Not too long ago the Clintons talked about “37 million” uninsured. The jump (is this the health-care inflation the Clintons warn about?) comes almost entirely in the phrase “some time each year.”
As Irwin Stelzer points out in Commentary, half the uninsured have insurance again within six months, and only 15 per cent of the uninsured stay that way for more than two years. Try about 5.5 million chronically uninsured. But even that overstates it. About 37 per cent of the uninsured are under the age of 25; for them insurance plans are often a bad buy. Take out all those who choose to go uninsured, and perhaps 3 per cent of the population can’t get insurance (but they can get care). Not a crisis.