| ArnieCare is a prescription for disaster |
 |
 |
| Written by Fred Hansen | |
| Saturday, 10 February 2007 | |
Last month, California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger presented his
proposal of universal health care for the Golden State, which would
offer health cover for all uninsured people including illegal
immigrants. Although he and Republican Presidential candidate Mitt
Romney from Massachusetts have become media darlings for their sweeping
health care reforms, the consequences of these programs, once
implemented, would be disastrous, says David Henderson in the Wall Street Journal .Gov. Schwarzenegger would require employers with 10 or more workers to provide health insurance or pay a 4% tax on all wages covered by Social Security…(He) would throw in a 2% tax on doctors and a 4 % tax on hospitals to help fund Medi-Cal, California’s name for Medicaid. And he would expand Medi-Cal to adults earning as much as 100% above the poverty line and to children, even those here illegally, in poor and middle-income families. He hopes by doing this, to shift $5 billion of Medi-Cal’s annual cost to the federal government.Schwarzenegger seems to have forgotten the lesson we learned with the failure of HillaryCare, another universal coverage scheme, two decades ago. The Clinton Administration engineered its implementation on a small scale in Tennessee. TennCare’s universal health coverage policy led not only to an explosion of enrolees – in short order one quarter of the state’s population was on TennCare – it also attracted fraud of all sorts, reports Patrick Poole. Almost daily, news stories would run about the rampant fraud within TennCare – enrolees living in a Trump Tower penthouse in Florida, Fortune 500 CEO’s flying their ailing children to Tennessee on their private planes to get qualified for TennCare and to receive organ transplants, and thousands of enrollers whose only connection to Tennessee was a P.O. box located in one of the many border cities around the state…As a result in the six years of TennCare, health care quality in Tennessee plummeted because doctors left the state in droves and a dozen hospitals closed – most of them in underserved areas. At the end only a taxpayers' revolt of sorts finally terminated the programme in 2000.
Bookmark
Comments (0)
 Write comment
This content has been locked. You can no longer post any comment.
|
Subscribe to this comment's feed
About the ASI
The Adam Smith Institute is the UK's leading innovator of free-market economic and social policies. Politically independent and non-profit, the Institute promotes its ideas through reports, briefings, events, media appearances, and its website and blog. For further information, click here.Join our email list
Keep up-to-date with the latest events, reports and information from the Adam Smith Institute by joining our fortnightly email list. It's free and you can unsubscribe at any point. Just enter your email address here:
