BUFFALO, N.Y. — Hillary Clinton is meticulously laying the
groundwork for a presidential bid in 2008, evident in her recent
round of ambitious speeches. The media was too busy reporting on
her illness last week to notice a revealing speech she gave in
Buffalo the day she fell sick, a speech in which she essentially
renewed her call for Hillary Care.
“The richest nation in the world should be able to find some way
to provide every citizen with quality, affordable, health
coverage,” Clinton said , arguing that it is a “moral
responsibility” of government to provide such coverage, one that is
in line with “our morals and religious obligations to care for the
sick.” Speaking at Canisius, a Jesuit college libertine enough to
host her, Clinton did not explain how this moral vision on behalf
of the sick and vulnerable squared with her staunch support for
abortion.
Clinton cited a litany of statistics to argue for refashioning
the U.S. health insurance system — none of which hold up. First,
Clinton said that the ranks of the “uninsured” are 40 million and
growing. This is not true. A May 2003 report by the Congressional
Budget Office states: “In recent years, the number of uninsured
people in the United States has been pegged at approximately 40
million, or about 16 percent of the nonelderly population. By CBO’s
analysis, that estimate overstates the number of people who are
uninsured all year and more closely approximates the number who are
uninsured at a point in time during the year. A more accurate
estimate of the number of people who were uninsured for all of 1998
— the most recent year for which reliable comparative data are
available — is 21 million to 31 million, or 9 percent to 13
percent of nonelderly Americans.”
Second, Hillary found it “troubling” that the U.S. “spends more
money than any other country in the world” on health care, yet “we
don’t have results as good as some of the other countries that do
have universal coverage,” saying that the U.S. ranks “37th in the
world in overall quality.” This is not true, according to Robert
Helms of the American Enterprise Institute, who notes that this
U.S. ranking is based on a “very flawed and misleading” United
Nations’ World Health Organization study.
Helms has written that the WHO “report exhibits a strong
ideological preference for health systems that rely on direct
government management, an emphasis on equality of delivery and
financing, and an absence of direct payment for medical care,”
observing that the WHO report thinks “health care is a special
economic activity requiring intense governmental involvement” —
exactly the type of system Clinton envisages.
Also misleading was Clinton’s claim that the U.S. spends “50
percent” more per capita on health care than Switzerland — “15
percent of GDP” compared to “10.9 percent” — yet has fewer doctors
and nurses than other countries. “We spend more for several
reasons,” Helms writes, “we are wealthier, our consumers have more
choices so are freer to spend as they chose, we have more use of
higher technologies (note that lots of Canadians and other
foreigners come to this country when they can’t get access to newer
technologies in their own countries), etc. — but it is extremely
difficult to measure actual differences in medical quality and
outcomes. Having more nurses is a symptom of the lower-tech care in
other systems. We certainly have more specialized physicians and
more access to them than in other countries.”
Finally, Clinton said that the “number one reason for family
bankruptcy” is due to the uninsured and underinsured having
“medical expenses they can’t pay.” Not so, according to the Galen
Institute’s Greg Scandlan, who has said that the study which
Clinton bases this argument on is “so biased as to be worthless”
because it comes from two partisans for universal health care,
Harvard doctors Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein,
“cofounders of Physicians for a National Health Program,” a group
that has been pushing for a government-run system.
Clinton made sure to avoid any mention of European countries
that are moving away from a national health care system. These
countries, groaning under the expenses of “free” health care, are
looking to the U.S. health care system as a model of reform.
John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis writes
that “Advocates of national health insurance would do well to look
at how countries like Germany, Sweden, and Australia are choosing
free-market reforms to alleviate the problems of their national
health systems.…Through painful experience, many of the
countries that once heralded the benefits of government control
have learned that the best remedy for their countries’ health care
crises is not increasing government power, but increasing patient
power instead.”
Worried about the health of her career, Clinton is back to
demagoguing health care, proposing Big Government remedies that
will make Americans no healthier than she was the day she gave her
speech.
