Category: The Dish

Healthcare For All But The Sick?

Jonathan Cohn explains one problem with McCain’s healthcare plan:

More than 30 states already have programs almost exactly like the one McCain just sketched out. They are called "high risk pools," and the idea is pretty straightforward: Private insurers agree to sell policies directly to individuals, even those with pre-existing medical conditions, as long as the state helps to subsidize the cost.

But the whole reason conservatives like McCain prefer this approach to liberal schemes for universal coverage is that it involves minimal government regulation. As a result, private insurers have enormous leeway in dictating the terms of coverage. And one place they use that leeway is by setting high prices.

A few years ago, a Commonwealth Fund study found that, on average, state high-risk pools offered coverage that was two-thirds more expensive than regularly priced coverage. In some states, the high-risk coverage was actually twice as high as regular coverage.

At those prices, you might think the coverage was spectacular. Not so. While private insurers in high-risk pools are willing to accept people with pre-existing conditions, they’re not generally willing to cover expenses related to those pre-existing conditions–at least not right away. Nearly all the plans surveyed had waiting periods of between six months and a year, during which the insurers would not cover care for prior medical problems.

More here.

Policy Anyone?

Tyler Cowen on McCain’s policy proposals:

Trade aside, so far I’ve yet to see many actual policy proposals from the McCain camp.  Mostly I’ve seen attempts to signal that they won’t do anything too offensive to the party’s right wing.  Very few of these trial balloons seem to be ideas that McCain had expressed much previous loyalty to.  I don’t even think we should be analyzing these statements as policy proposals.  We should be wondering why the Republican Party has given up on the idea of policy proposals.

This seems a little excessive to me. McCain has offered several concrete proposals – but they seem rather muddled and political, rather than the product of a coherent worldview. The three-quarters-baked healthcare idea – which would, I suspect, be obliterated by either Democrat in the fall; the League of Democracies that wouldn’t, for some reason, include India; the open-ended commitment to occupying Iraq; the gas tax holiday; and the strange melange of GOP idees fixes in the economic proposals: none of this is very encouraging, is it?

The underlying weakness of the McCain candidacy is a media blindspot right now. Because it involves explaining and thinking about policy, which is something we hacks are sometimes too lazy to do.

North Carolina

Signs of tightening. Jeremiah Wright should get it over with and endorse Hillary. The next week will indeed show if this hole in the road for Obama has stalled him in the very final stretch. Joe Andrew’s move seems to me to be an indicator of how many top Democrats are worried, mad at Wright, furious at the Clintons and concerned about the fall. I cannot see how Obama can be denied at this point; but I do think that mounting pressure for a unity Obama-Clinton ticket may be the consequence.

Iraq As Colombia?

Robert Kaplan writes:

Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like, in our best dreams. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has fought — and is winning — a counterinsurgency war even as he has liberalized the economy, strengthened institutions, and improved human rights. Nuri al Maliki and Hamid Karzai could learn from him. The failure of Congress to pass a free-trade pact indicates that the greatest threat to our power is our own domestic dysfunction. What should be the icing on the cake to a successful nation-building program has become an embarrassment.

Earlier thoughts about Iraq following the Finnish model here.