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WARNING!
Gore/Bush
Coming ... |
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Both
Candidates
Flunk the Just
Health Care Test
Neither candidate is willing
to address the need for truly
comprehensive, universal health care.
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Just Health Care rally outside
the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. Photo ©2000 Harvey
Finkle, Impact
Visuals |
Since Clinton and Gore took office, the number
of uninsured has rocketed. Even the insured are worse off,
since we’ve shifted from a largely fee-for-service system to
one run by huge profit-making HMOs. The latest cheery news is
that health insurance premiums are rising from 10 to 30
percent across the country.
Gore now proposes a series of piecemeal
reforms to a system that most people know is rotten to the
core: a "Patients Bill of Rights," expansion of the
Children’s Health Insurance Program, tax credits to help
small business and the uninsured pay for insurance, and a
prescription drug benefit in Medicare. As Quentin Young of
Physicians for a National Health Program noted in the last
issue of Labor Party Press, "the problem with Gore’s
approach is that it is purely incremental, and incrementalism
doesn’t work."
Bush would make things worse rather than
incrementally better. Like Gore, he proposes a refundable tax
credit to help low-income uninsured people purchase health
insurance. But he also proposes to partially privatize
Medicare.
'BIZARRE ISOLATION'
The U.S. is living in bizarre isolation from
the rest of the world when it comes to health care. No other
nation spends so much, covers so few, and does it so poorly.
The World Health Organization recently ranked the U.S. health
care system 37th among nations, at the bottom of industrial
countries.
Yet neither major political party will step up
to the plate to confront the issue. The Labor Party wants to
reignite a fight for a complete overhaul of our health care
system, taking control away from HMOs and other corporate
interests. Under our Just Health Care plan, the nation would
spend no more than it does now for health care, and everyone
would be guaranteed full, quality health care coverage.
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