Well, not exactly. But HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson came pretty close — without knowing it — during testimony before a Senate committee yesterday.
You may have heard a bit about the 44 million Americans who don’t have health insurance. In the 2000 campaign, Bush said he had a “plan to do something” to help them, but so far, he’s kept it under wraps while millions more are added to the ranks of the uninsured.
Never fear. Thompson has explained that we already have “universal coverage” in America, even if we don’t know it. He told a Senate panel:
“Even if you don’t have health insurance, you are still taken care of in America. That certainly could be defined as universal coverage.”
This is certainly one of the most amusing things I’ve ever heard out of the Bush administration. At a minimum, Thompson was endorsing the most inefficient system of socialized medicine ever devised.
Under Thomspon’s vision of health care in America — and remember he’s the nation’s highest-ranking government official on health and human services — sick people receive care whether they have insurance or not. That’s true. If you’re sick, there are public hospitals that will treat you in an emergency room.
Of course, it’s extremely expensive to treat ill patients in this way and it would be far cheaper to pay for preventative care so that people don’t have to wait for a medical emergency to go to the hospital.
Under the Thompson model, a sick person with no insurance goes to the emergency room for treatment. Does he get a bill once he’s taken care of? Probably, but it doesn’t matter because he can’t afford to pay it.
If the patient can’t pay the bill and hospital can’t treat sick patients for free, who pays the medical bill? Hmm, let’s see… oh, now I remember. It’s everyone else who picks up the tab.
That’s right, Thompson is outlining a system — indeed, he was kind of bragging about it — that embraces the biggest right-wing boogeyman of them all: socialized medicine. Everyone pays, everyone gets treatment.
Sure, it’s the most wildly expensive and inefficient system imaginable to deliver “universal care,” but Thompson, inadvertently, endorsed and explained the Republican approach to providing health care to the nation.
Politically, this is great. The Bush administration believes we have a system that “could be defined as universal coverage,” while the Democrats believe we should have a system that has universal coverage.
Our approach costs less and helps more; their approach costs more and helps less. Let’s make the 2004 election a referendum on which side has the better plan and see who wins.