“Even if you don’t have health insurance, you are still taken care of in America. That certainly could be defined as universal coverage.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.
\n
\nUnder Thomspon’s vision of health care in America — and remember he’s the nation’s highest-ranking government official<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
Of course, it’s extremely expensive<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/i> who picks up the tab.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/i> universal coverage.<\/p>\n
Our approach<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}