Hillary Care 2.0

Rich Lowry:

When it comes to health care, Hillary Clinton is never going to let her name be associated with the words "radical overhaul" ever again. Or, if she can help it, with massive bureaucracy or new taxes. That's what happened in 1993 with her health-care plan as first lady, and, as she never tires of saying, she has "the scars to prove it."

HillaryCare 2.0 is an entirely different enterprise, or so she would have us believe. It's the "American Health Choices Plan." It "builds on the current system to give businesses and their employers greater choice of health plans," while imposing "no overall increase in health spending or taxes." It's the all-things-to-all-people, sweetness-and-light, all-benefits-and-no-costs health-care plan of 2007.

It's also a sign of how she has wised up since her famous debacle early in her husband's first term. For a liberal seeking to expand government-run health care, it's not necessary to create new, elaborate governmental mechanisms that are vulnerable to parody and frightening to voters. Simply building on the status quo is enough to hasten us toward national health insurance.

That's because we have a hybrid system of private insurance and government health care that is increasingly tilting toward government. As the conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru points out, only 12 percent of health-care costs are paid out of pocket, and the government already pays almost half of health-care costs. Liberals need only push this system toward its logical conclusion.

Because the private health-insurance market doesn't function properly, the government is left to pick up the pieces. But it is government policies that distort the health-insurance market in the first place. Ideally, people would pay for their own health insurance, the way they do with, say, auto insurance. But the tax code favors insurance that people get through their employers.

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Neither Hillary or the Democrats have earned any credibility on this subject. This legislation should fail for the same reason comprehensive immigration reform failed. There is just no reason to trust the government on this issue either. Hillary and the Democrats love this kind of program because they are control freaks and do not trust the people are the market place. The most rationale reform of the health care system would be health savings accounts coupled with large deductible policies for catastrophic events. It would allow policies to be sold across state lines and not require that they be tied to employers. The current system is driving up costs because it distorts the market place and the Hillary 2.0 would exacerbate that problem. Health savings account would restore some market forces to the health care business.

As usual Karl Rove gets the Republican response to the Democrat control freak agenda pitch perfect by listing several plans to give the power to the patiences and not the government. His list of specific programs are some that the control freaks have already tried to kill, but they are the real answer to the problem.