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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (8450)	10/9/1998 2:42:00 PM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Hillary copied the German plan, not the Candian plan. If it was such a great plan, there wouldn't have been so many groups exempted from the plan. Government employees would not have paid into the system --- as in Social Security. Unions would not have paid into the system. The tax she proposed was 8-9% for the plan. This would likely have gone up considerably as it did in Social Security. There were also proposals that retirees from some Rust Belt union plans would be placed into the plan. The unions would no longer have to pay into the coverage for their retirees. I don't want to be asked to sacrifice for a national plan in which so many are opting out at the start. We've already had that fiasco with Social Security. The basic reason that many people are becoming uninsured is that the government is shifting costs to other payors. They codified payment limits in the Medicare/Medicaid regulations that require service providers to charge other patients much more. The government passed community rating laws in states that caused younger people to drop their coverage since their premiums were being artificially adjusted up to bring premiums for the elderly down. We just saw a latest fiasco when the HMO's started dropping Medicare since Medicare set unreasonably low copayments.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (8450)	10/9/1998 3:24:00 PM
From: j_b	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

<<She put together a proposal and it didnt fly - SO WHAT. What is the issue here huh?>> The specific issues people had with the plan itself were already discussed on another person's response to you. However, I think the question you were asking here is germane. The issue as I remember it was that Hillary was not elected, not appointed, had no official position, and yet was the head of this committee. She also put together a group of people that tried to hold meetings in secret, something that was prohibited by law. Hillary claimed that the particular makeup of the committee (public employee or private industry member) was such that open meetings were not required. That turned out to not be true, since she had misrepresented the status of various members of the committee. It looked to many people as if Hillary was trying to bypass the rules imposed on government and force her health care proposal down the throats of an unwilling public. The short answer - it wasn't the proposal, it was the way the agenda was pursued, using back-room power politics instead of open debate.