01.11.08

Inane AAS Editorial On AG’s Health Care Gambit

Posted in Around The State, Commentary, Health Care, Media, Privatization at 10:41 am by wcnews

The SCLM is at it again, here’s the link, Chipping away at Texas’ lacking health care solution. Excerpted below are the beginning and the end of the editorial. In between is just the banal retelling of how Texas is near the top in uninsured. They start out by telling us that although this plan is minimal, it’s “innovative”, and welcomed nonetheless. Then at the bottom the appear to change their mind and endorse the plan mention by the CPPP in yesterday’s article.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott proposes a welcome and innovative idea for providing health insurance to more children who aren’t covered now.

Abbott wants the state to contract with a private insurance company to cover about 200,000 uninsured children in the state’s child support system that his office runs. Families would voluntarily pay premiums for the program, but a court could order them to pay based on income. And the state could deduct premiums from child support payments.

Texas leads the nation in the percentage of uninsured children, so Abbott’s plan would help reduce those ranks, though not by much. Even so, we welcome any proposals that chip away at the huge deficit of Texans without health insurance.

[...]

So Abbott’s plan to cover more children is welcome. But we wonder if his plan might work better, be less expensive and cover more children if it were incorporated into CHIP, as Anne Dunkelberg, associate director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities suggested. She said CHIP could accommodate Abbott’s proposal by raising the income limit (about $41,300 for a family of four), allowing child support families to buy into CHIP.

That is an idea worth exploring.

Instead of attempting to be fair and balanced and show both sides, the AAS would have served it’s public purpose much better with an editorial explaining what a ploy this is by the AG to pander on the issue of children’s health care, while signaling to insurance corporations that he’s on their side in the health care battle. They should have pointed out what AG Abbott and the GOP’s real agenda is with this ploy and why they would never go for incorporating these uninsured children into CHIP. From Fire Dog Lake back in July:

Despite bipartisan support in both houses for significant expansion of SCHIP, the Republican leadership has decided to block any major expansion and to support President Bush’s threatened veto [h/t Jane]. And why are they against expanding a successful children’s health program, especially when solving the problem of uninsured/uncovered Americans is high on the public’s wish list? The answers reveal today’s Republicans at their hypocritical worst.

Partly it’s because this is the opening skirmish in the looming battle over the structure of health care reform. You see, if access to SCHIP’s pooled funding mechanism is expanded, so that more Americans can choose it, then Republicans fear Americans who have a choice between the tax-funded pool and private insurance plans that are more expensive (unless subsidized) will choose the tax-funded pool approach — just like a single payer system. That solution costs less, but the private insurers lose business. So the Republican game is to preclude as many people as they can from having this choice by limiting access to the pooled approach, and then pushing people into private insurance plans through direct subsidies, tax credit incentives or simply denying Americans any other choice.

Their not for insuring more children, they’re for cynical attempts to prop up a decaying system. The GOP will try to pacify and allay the people with these incremental, insufficient steps, to make it look like they’re trying to fix the health insurance system. When, in reality, what they’re really doing is trying and prop up a failed health insurance system that only benefits insurance corporations and the politicians they own. And the AAS is derelict in their duty to the public by not pointing that out.

EOW post from earlier in the week.

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