Health Care
Edwards Calls For President Bush To Support Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act

"Stem cell research is not just another political issue. It's a moral issue, and where you stand is a test of moral leadership."

"More than any of the presidential candidates, John Edwards has come up with a specific and plausible plan that provides for health care coverage for all Americans."
Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times

John Edwards has a bold plan to transform America's health care system and provide universal health care for every man, woman and child in America.

Under the Edwards Plan:

Families without insurance will get coverage at an affordable price.

Families with insurance will pay less and get more security and choices.

Businesses and other employers will find it cheaper and easier to insure their workers.

The Edwards Plan achieves universal coverage by:

Requiring businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance.
Making insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and taking innovative steps to contain health care costs.

Creating regional "Health Care Markets" to let every American share the bargaining power to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance.
Once these steps have been taken, requiring all American residents to get insurance.

Securing universal healthcare for every American will require the active involvement of millions of Americans.

"So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable."
Paul Krugman
The New York Times

"[W]hile health care for all is now a popular slogan, Edwards is the only candidate offering a plan that would actually get to universal coverage."
-- Karen Tumulty
Time Magazine

"John Edwards came out with the most comprehensive plan for healthcare."
-- Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union

"John Edwards has made a serious and thoughtful proposal to address the growing health care crisis. His innovative plan offers practical steps to lower the high cost of health care, improve the quality of care and provide coverage for all Americans."
-- Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (MA)

I'd like to read some others, too.
-- Shep

Hillary's:

Hillary Clinton unveiled the third part of her plan to ensure that all Americans have affordable, quality health insurance. Building on her proposals to rein in costs and to insist on value and quality, her American Health Choices Plan will secure, simplify and ensure choice in health coverage for all Americans. This Plan covers every American - finally addressing the needs of the 47 million uninsured and the tens of millions of workers with coverage who fear they could be one pink slip away from losing their health coverage - with no overall increase in health spending or taxes. For those with health insurance, the plan builds on the current system to give businesses and their employees greater choice of health plans - including keeping the one they have - while lowering cost and improving quality. Specifically, the American Health Choices Plan will:

The American Health Choices Plan gives Americans the choice to preserve their existing coverage, while offering new choices to those with insurance, to the 47 million people in the United States without insurance, and the tens of millions more at risk of losing coverage.

The Same Choice of Health Plan Options that Members of Congress Receive: Americans can keep their existing coverage or access the same menu of quality private insurance options that their Members of Congress receive through a new Health Choices Menu, established without any new bureaucracy as part of the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program (FEHBP). In addition to the broad array of private options that Americans can choose from, they will be offered the choice of a public plan option similar to Medicare.

A Guarantee of Quality Coverage: The new array of choices offered in the Menu will provide benefits at least as good as the typical plan offered to Members of Congress, which includes mental health parity and usually dental coverage.

Americans who are satisfied with the coverage they have today can keep it, while benefiting from lower premiums and higher quality.

Reducing Costs: By removing hidden taxes, stressing prevention and a focus on efficiency and modernization, the plan will improve quality and lower costs.

Strengthening Security: The plan ensures that job loss or family illnesses will never lead to a loss of coverage or exorbitant costs.

End to Unfair Health Insurance Discrimination: By creating a level-playing field of insurance rules across states and markets, the plan ensures that no American is denied coverage, refused renewal, unfairly priced out of the market, or forced to pay excessive insurance company premiums.

Relying on consumers or the government alone to fix the system has unintended consequences, like scaled-back coverage or limited choices. This plan ensures that all who benefit from the system share in the responsibility to fix its shortcomings.

Insurance and Drug Companies: insurance companies will end discrimination based on pre-existing conditions or expectations of illness and ensure high value for every premium dollar; while drug companies will offer fair prices and accurate information.

Individuals: will be required to get and keep insurance in a system where insurance is affordable and accessible.

Providers: will work collaboratively with patients and businesses to deliver high-quality, affordable care.

Employers: will help financing the system; large employers will be expected to provide health insurance or contribute to the cost of coverage: small businesses will receive a tax credit to continue or begin to offer coverage.

Government: will ensure that health insurance is always affordable and never a crushing burden on any family and will implement reforms to improve quality and lower cost.

Senator Clinton’s plan will:

Provide Tax Relief to Ensure Affordability: Working families will receive a refundable tax credit to help them afford high-quality health coverage.

Limit Premium Payments to a Percentage of Income: The refundable tax credit will be designed to prevent premiums from exceeding a percentage of family income, while maintaining consumer price consciousness in choosing health plans.

Create a New Small Business Tax Credit: To make it easier-not harder-for small businesses to create new jobs with health coverage, a new health care tax credit for small businesses will provide an incentive for job-based coverage.

Strengthen Medicaid and CHIP: The Plan will fix the holes in the safety net to ensure that the most vulnerable populations receive affordable, quality care.

Launch a Retiree Health Legacy Initiative: A new tax credit for qualifying private and public retiree health plans will offset a significant portion of catastrophic expenditures, so long as savings are dedicated to workers and competitiveness.


Most Savings Come Through Lowering Spending Due to Quality and Modernization: Over half the savings come from the public savings generated from Senator Clinton’s broader agenda to modernize the heath systems and reduce wasteful health spending.

A Net Tax Cut for American Taxpayers: The plan offers tens of millions of Americans a new tax credit to make premiums affordable-which more than offsets the increased revenues from the Plan’s provisions to limit the employer tax exclusion for health care and discontinue portions of the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000. Thus, the plan provides a net tax cut for American taxpayers.

Making the Employer Tax Exclusion for Health Care Fairer: The plan protects the current exclusion from taxes of employer-provided health premiums, but limits the exclusion for the high-end portion of very generous plans for those making over $250,000.

Good work Shep.........some of us have to think about all of us......not just me

Thanks, Rich. And this speech from Obama:
The Time Has Come for Universal Health Care
Thursday, January 25, 2007

Printable Format
Families USA Conference, Washington, DC


Thank you Ron Pollack and thank you Families USA for inviting me to speak here this morning.

On this January morning of two thousand and seven, more than sixty years after President Truman first issued the call for national health insurance, we find ourselves in the midst of an historic moment on health care. From Maine to California, from business to labor, from Democrats to Republicans, the emergence of new and bold proposals from across the spectrum has effectively ended the debate over whether or not we should have universal health care in this country.

Plans that tinker and halfway measures now belong to yesterday. The President's latest proposal that does little to bring down cost or guarantee coverage falls into this category. There will be many others offered in the coming campaign, and I am working with experts to develop my own plan as we speak, but let's make one thing clear right here, right now:

In the 2008 campaign, affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how. We have the ideas, we have the resources, and we will have universal health care in this country by the end of the next president's first term.


I know there's a cynicism out there about whether this can happen, and there's reason for it. Every four years, health care plans are offered up in campaigns with great fanfare and promise. But once those campaigns end, the plans collapse under the weight of Washington politics, leaving the rest of America to struggle with skyrocketing costs.

For too long, this debate has been stunted by what I call the smallness of our politics - the idea that there isn't much we can agree on or do about the major challenges facing our country. And when some try to propose something bold, the interests groups and the partisans treat it like a sporting event, with each side keeping score of who's up and who's down, using fear and divisiveness and other cheap tricks to win their argument, even if we lose our solution in the process.

Well we can't afford another disappointing charade in 2008. It's not only tiresome, it's wrong. Wrong when businesses have to layoff one employee because they can't afford the health care of another. Wrong when a parent cannot take a sick child to the doctor because they cannot afford the bill that comes with it. Wrong when 46 million Americans have no health care at all. In a country that spends more on health care than any other nation on Earth, it's just wrong.

And yet, in recent years, what's caught the attention of those who haven't always been in favor of reform is the realization that this crisis isn't just morally offensive, it's economically untenable. For years, the can't-do crowd has scared the American people into believing that universal health care would mean socialized medicine and burdensome taxes - that we should just stay out of the way and tinker at the margins.

You know the statistics. Family premiums are up by nearly 87% over the last five years, growing five times faster than workers' wages. Deductibles are up 50%. Co-payments for care and prescriptions are through the roof.

Nearly 11 million Americans who are already insured spent more than a quarter of their salary on health care last year. And over half of all family bankruptcies today are caused by medical bills.

But they say it's too costly to act.

Almost half of all small businesses no longer offer health care to their workers, and so many others have responded to rising costs by laying off workers or shutting their doors for good. Some of the biggest corporations in America, giants of industry like GM and Ford, are watching foreign competitors based in countries with universal health care run circles around them, with a GM car containing twice as much health care cost as a Japanese car.

But they say it's too risky to act.

They tell us it's too expensive to cover the uninsured, but they don't mention that every time an American without health insurance walks into an emergency room, we pay even more. Our family's premiums are $922 higher because of the cost of care for the uninsured.

We pay $15 billion more in taxes because of the cost of care for the uninsured. And it's trapped us in a vicious cycle. As the uninsured cause premiums to rise, more employers drop coverage. As more employers drop coverage, more people become uninsured, and premiums rise even further.

But the skeptics tell us that reform is too costly, too risky, too impossible for America.

Well the skeptics must be living somewhere else. Because when you see what the health care crisis is doing to our families, to our economy, to our country, you realize that caution is what's costly. Inaction is what's risky. Doing nothing is what's impossible when it comes to health care in America.

It's time to act. This isn't a problem of money, this is a problem of will. A failure of leadership. We already spend $2.2 trillion a year on health care in this country. My colleague, Senator Ron Wyden, who's recently developed a bold new health care plan of his own, tells it this way:

For the money Americans spent on health care last year, we could have hired a group of skilled physicians, paid each one of them $200,000 to care for just seven families, and guaranteed every single American quality, affordable health care.

So where's all that money going? We know that a quarter of it - one out of every four health care dollars - is spent on non-medical costs; mostly bills and paperwork. And we also know that this is completely unnecessary. Almost every other industry in the world has saved billions on these administrative costs by doing it all online. Every transaction you make at a bank now costs them less than a penny. Even at the Veterans Administration, where it used to cost nine dollars to pull up your medical record, new technology means you can call up the same record on the internet for next to nothing.

But because we haven't updated technology in the rest of the health care industry, a single transaction still costs up to twenty-five dollars - not one dime of which goes toward improving the quality of our health care.

This is simply inexcusable, and if we brought our entire health care system online, something everyone from Ted Kennedy to Newt Gingrich believes we should do, we'd already be saving over $600 million a year on health care costs.

The federal government should be leading the way here. If you do business with the federal employee health benefits program, you should move to an electronic claims system. If you are a provider who works with Medicare, you should have to report your patient's health outcomes, so that we can figure out, on a national level, how to improve health care quality. These are all things experts tell us must be done but aren't being done. And the federal government should lead.

Another, more controversial area we need to look at is how much of our health care spending is going toward the record-breaking profits earned by the drug and health care industry. It's perfectly understandable for a corporation to try and make a profit, but when those profits are soaring higher and higher each year while millions lose their coverage and premiums skyrocket, we have a responsibility to ask why.

At a time when businesses are facing increased competition and workers rarely stay with one company throughout their lives, we also have to ask if the employer-based system of health care itself is still the best for providing insurance to all Americans. We have to ask what we can do to provide more Americans with preventative care, which would mean fewer doctor's visits and less cost down the road. We should make sure that every single child who's eligible is signed up for the children's health insurance program, and the federal government should make sure that our states have the money to make that happen. And we have to start looking at some of the interesting ideas on comprehensive reform that are coming out of states like Maine and Illinois and California, to see what we can replicate on a national scale and what will move us toward that goal of universal coverage for all.

But regardless of what combination of policies and proposals get us to this goal, we must reach it. We must act. And we must act boldly. As one health care advocate recently said, "The most expensive course is to do nothing." But it wasn't a liberal Democrat or union leader who said this.

It was the president of the very health industry association that funded the "Harry and Louise" ads designed to kill the Clinton health care plan in the early nineties.

The debate in this country over health care has shifted. The support for comprehensive reform that organizations like Families USA have worked so hard to build is now widespread, and the diverse group of business and health industry interests that are part of your Health Care Coverage Coalition is a testament to that success. And so Washington no longer has an excuse for caution. Leaders no longer have a reason to be timid. And America can no longer afford inaction. That's not who we are - and that's not the story of our nation's improbable progress.

Half a century ago, America found itself in the midst of another health care crisis. For millions of elderly Americans, the single greatest cause of poverty and hardship was the crippling cost of health care and the lack of affordable insurance. Two out of every three elderly Americans had annual incomes of less than $1,000, and only one in eight had health insurance.

As health care and hospital costs continued to rise, more and more private insurers simply refused to insure our elderly, believing they were too great of a risk to care for.

The resistance to action was fierce. Proponents of health care reform were opposed by well-financed, well-connected interest groups who spared no expense in telling the American people that these efforts were "dangerous" and "un-American," "revolutionary" and even "deadly."

And yet the reformers marched on. They testified before Congress and they took their case to the country and they introduced dozens of different proposals but always, always they stood firm on their goal to provide health care for every American senior. And finally, after years of advocacy and negotiation and plenty of setbacks, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law on July 30th of 1965.

The signing ceremony was held in Missouri, in a town called Independence, with the first man who was bold enough to issue the call for universal health care - President Harry Truman.

And as he stood with Truman by his side and signed what would become the most successful government program in history - a program that had seemed impossible for so long - President Johnson looked out at the crowd and said, "History shapes men, but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can help shape history."

Never forget that we have it within our power to shape history in this country. It is not in our character to sit idly by as victims of fate or circumstance, for we are a people of action and innovation, forever pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Now is the time to push those boundaries once more. We have come so far in the debate on health care in this country, but now we must finally answer the call first issued by Truman, advanced by Johnson, and fought for by so many leaders and Americans throughout the last century. The time has come for universal health care in America. And I look forward to working with all of you to meet this challenge in the weeks and months to come. Thank you.

Didn't realize Braylon was so intelligent. I wonder what Winslow thinks about healthcare.

Damn. That's a fine speech.

Winslow says vote Clinton, vote Obama, vote Edwards... or stay home.

How does this pertain to football?? Can you answer that??


I think there is a forum for this stuff...you are talking to yourself as it is.

It is not often that I agree w/ a Gator, but get this garbage off of the browns forum shep.
Don't you understand we come to this board to GET AWAY from this crap we hear about everyday.

The same five people read over there. This is the off-season and you guys don't have to read non-football threads.

Why did you read this one?

Medicare:

Overview
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administers Medicare, the nation's largest health insurance program, which covers nearly 40 million Americans. Medicare is a Health Insurance Program for people age 65 or older, some disabled people under age 65, and people of all ages with End-Stage Renal Disease (permanent kidney failure treated with dialysis or a transplant).

Medicaid:
Good health is important to everyone. If you can't afford to pay for medical care right now, Medicaid can make it possible for you to get the care that you need so that you can get healthy – and stay healthy.

Medicaid is available only to certain low-income individuals and families who fit into an eligibility group that is recognized by federal and state law. Medicaid does not pay money to you; instead, it sends payments directly to your health care providers. Depending on your state's rules, you may also be asked to pay a small part of the cost (co-payment) for some medical services. ("Medicaid At-A-Glance 2005" may be downloaded from the bottom of the page.)

Medicaid is a state administered program and each state sets its own guidelines regarding eligibility and services. Read more about your state Medicaid program. (See Related Links inside CMS at the bottom of the page.)

So programs are in place to take of people.

What these gov't programs don't work?

So New gov't programs will?

Are any of these people running for Pres not currently in the organization that governs these programs?

Were these programs not in affect when Bill Clinton was in office?

So how is all this Bush's fault?

quote:

Originally posted by shepwrite:
The same five people read over there. This is the off-season and you guys don't have to read non-football threads.

Why did you read this one?

Why have different forums then??

All this does is bury football topics......but I guess you don't really care to get it.

DA had thoughts on this subject but they got intercepted!

Now thats funny!!!

Thanks shep for posting that speech. Either Obama or his writing staff need to be congratulated for proving that a presidential candidate need not to sound like a national guard pilot who hid from active duty in vietnam. Obama may not win his nomination but he is a damn fine orator.

Hey shep i think my site will be done by the end of february you and any others who have debated and argued (yes even you diehard) would be more than welcome. www.stoppolitics.com My mission is to organize and actively attack special interest and lobbyists who have hijacked our democratic system and push for a online voting system. One of the other goals are to find ways to make every vote actually count. I am not a big fan of the electoral college and individual state races when it comes to the national presidency. My site is being designed for anyone of any or no political parties who are tired of the same scum bags who currently inhabit a corrupt system.

There are other goals but as of right now i think that until i can recruit some decent moderators and online organizers that is enough.

Shep, all of these candidate's plans suggest "improving quality while lowering cost" -a notion that warms my heart, but that's about it- how does one go about doing that?

(And any chance they know anything about defensive talent evaluation for the upcoming season? )

SoCal, that was funny. Is it the generic name for Percocet?

Sev, that sounds fantastic. How do you feel about Edwards? It seems like the focal point of his campaign, taking America back from big corporations and interest groups and giving it back to the people.

But it's hard, man. The Man owns the media, too, and you can see how easily they convince people that, ironically, they stand for the everyman and old-time values and shit. It's brilliant.

Leg, all three talked about where the bulk of the savings comes from, and I'm pretty certain there will be some taxes to be paid by the people who can afford it.

Only Obama's plan doesn't require every adult to buy health insurance somehow, some way. The point is that the cost of the uninsured is way higher than the cost of insuring them. And if they get a tax credit for it, and a cap on Percentage of Income, they expect them to use it.

They did a bit of spatting over that last night, but they all seem to have thought out plans. I really don't think their answer to the economics of it is, "I'll come up with something."

Interesting that an article about McCain's plan (he has one) said he's unique because the other GOP types aren't talking about healthcare.

Well, of course they aren't. Why talk about healthcare and the climate crisis? How could those things matter?