Health Reform Plan Paper
Health care reform has been a controversial topic between the government and public alike for many years now. President Harry Truman in the 1940’s was the first to recognize that our country needed some sort of universal health care (McLaughlin 2008). Fast forward to the year 1990 and little has changed since then. The health care act of the 1990’s proposed by Clinton was one that originally gained momentum but eventually didn’t pass. This was because of a major disconnect between the officials who made the new health care act and the citizens of the country they were trying to influence on the new concept. This paper will describe why president Clintons healthcare reform act didn’t get passed into law and three changes that I think would have made the act better. In the 1990’s in the United States there was a lack of transparitity between the government and the citizens when it came to the health care debate. The individuals designing the new healthcare law were at first good at drumming up support in the general public but after a while momentum dwindled. When the health care act was first introduced polls showed that 21% of Americans supported the new plan but that soon dwindled down to 5%. In the beginning president Clinton was good at addressing the public on some key issues they were concerned about with regards to the state of the current health care system. He proposed health care for everyone on matter if they were to lose their jobs or not. The economy was in a rescission at the time and this proved to lower many citizens’ fears about not having health care available if they were to become unemployed. Clinton also focused on the idea that the big health care organizations where very “greedy” and “waste full” and how his plan was supposed to fix these issues. But after his original address to the citizens of the U.S. they were basically left in the dark on the details of how these major changes were to take place. The only people debating these issues were the different parties with in the government. Citizens of the country had basically no say in how this new act was going to take effect. So this lead to major disillusionment on their part. When it came time for the citizens to vote they went against the healthcare reform (Yankelovich 1995). Another main reason the Clinton healthcare reform act had no chance of working was because the claims made to the general public on why the current system was bound to fail were simply not true. Clinton said that the reason the current system is not working is because of the “greed” and “waste” seen in the health care industry. Now this is partly to blame but is not the real reason behind the rising cost of health care. The two main factors in this rising cost are the increasing numbers of the aging population in U.S. and the rise in cost of new medical technologies available. The older people get the more frequently need medical attention. When it comes to new technologies our system is set up in such a manner in which we will always go with the latest and greatest no matter what the cost differential is. Even though it can be more than double or triple the cost of the original method with little difference in outcome (Yankelovich 1995).
.
Three things I would change with the Clinton plan are this. First I would make the plan more of an income tax based system rather that an employer paid system. I believe this gives the consumer more accountability and choice when it comes to finding the right plan for their needs. It also