Giuliani: Clueless on Health Care

A lot of people are talking about this extremely unflattering profile of Judy Giuliani, so I'll leave it to them. I will simply mention that her husband commented on the article while at an event touting his great healthcare plan, wherein he reveals that he doesn't know a thing about healthcare.

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday offered a consumer-oriented solution to the nation's health care woes that relies on giving individuals tax credits to purchase private insurance.

Critical to Giuliani's plan is a $15,000 tax deduction for families to buy private health insurance, instead of getting insurance through employers. Any leftover funds could be rolled over year-to-year for medical expenses.

Campaigning in this first primary state, Giuliani said his goal is to give individuals more control over their health care. The former New York mayor said as more people buy plans, insurers will drop their prices, making insurance affordable to those who lack it now.

So the plan is:
Individuals without any collective leverage buy health insurance.
????
Health costs lower!!!

There's no mandate here, people are still only encouraged to purchase insurance. And people who can't afford to buy insurance don't MAKE $15,000 in income that would be taxed. In other words, this gives the uninsured approximately $0 to help them buy health insurance. It's the principle of "You're On Your Own."

''Government cannot take care of you. You've got to take care of yourself,'' he said. ''As more of us do that, the cheaper it will become and the higher in quality it becomes.''

There's absolutely no mechanism to make health care cheaper. If more people had health insurance, maybe the risk pool is widened, but there's nothing there to get more people health insurance. And if you're wondering how Giuliani will pay for this, which will cost the federal government bundles of money while not improving health care at all...

Giuliani offered the broad outline of his plan but his campaign did not provide many specifics. Asked how much his plan would cost and how many of the people without insurance it would help, Giuliani said he won't have those answers for two or three months.

He also acknowledged that it could take years for insurers to drop their prices and make insurance affordable to those who don't have it.

Brilliant.

This is the type of conservative "ideas" that aren't really ideas at all to do anything but drain the federal treasury and ensure the status quo by blocking progress entirely.

[W]hy should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.

And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.

So Rudy Giuliani and his conservative buddies can demonize successful approaches to cover all of our citizens as "socialized medicine" so that nobody notices how successful they really are. There's no indication that there's any desire by Giuliani to genuinely heal people, just a means to get people off his back.

Your modern conservative movement. Protecting the past, afraid of the future, ignorant of the concerns of actual citizens.

UPDATE: Good point by Aravosis. The President, Vice President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court all were in the hospital for medical procedures this week and didn't have to bat an eyelash: the government pays for their health care. Biut they'd rather not bestow such peace of mind on ordinary folks because they're so... ordinary.