Categories

Tag: Brad DeLong

The Great American Health Care Divide

In 1883, the authoritarian imperial government of Prince Otto von Bismarck – who famously declared, “It is not by speeches and majority votes that the great issues of our time will be decided…but by blood and iron” – established national health insurance for Germany.

The rationale for national health insurance is as clear now as it was to Bismarck 130 years ago. A country’s success – whether measured by the glory of its Kaiser, the expansion of its territory, the security of its borders, or the well-being of its population – rests on the health of its people.

Serious illness can strike anyone, and seriously ill people, as a rule, do not earn much money. The longer the seriously ill are untreated, the more costly their eventual treatment and maintenance become.

Private savings, as a rule, can pay the costs of treatment only for the thrifty and the well-off. So, unless we adopt the view that those without ample savings who fall seriously ill should quickly die (and so decrease the surplus population), a country with national health insurance will be a wealthier and more successful country. These arguments were entirely convincing to Bismarck. They are equally convincing today.

On January 1, 2014, the United States will partly implement a law – the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – that will not establish national health insurance, but that will, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office, reduce by almost one-half the number of people in the US without health insurance. Back in 2009, President Barack Obama could have proposed a program as comprehensive as the one initiated by Bismarck. Such a program could have allowed, encouraged, and made it affordable for uninsured Americans to obtain health insurance similar to what members of Congress have; or it simply could have expanded the existing Medicare system for those over 65 to cover all Americans.

Instead, Obama put his weight behind the complicated ACA. The reason, as it was explained to me back in 2009, was that the core of the ACA was identical to the plan that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had proposed and signed into law in that state in 2006: “ObamaCare” would be “RomneyCare” with a new coat of paint. With Romney the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for the 2012 presidential election, few Republicans would be able to vote against what was their candidate’s signature legislative initiative as governor.

Thus, the US Congress, it was supposed, would enact the ACA with healthy and bipartisan majorities, and Obama would demonstrate that he could transcend Washington’s partisan gridlock.

Continue reading…

fs25 mods