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December 04, 2005 at 02:00 PM
One of the favorite activities after an election is making up wish lists. This is something that the winning politicians do, of course. But it’s also a practice that interest groups partake of, whether their “side” was the winner in the election or not.
One of the characteristics of a wish list is that you don’t expect to get everything on it. This leads to adding and padding of the list in anticipation of at least some of the items being whittled and/or scuttled.
One such list, which obviously had been in preparation for quite some time before the election, came from America’s Health Insurance Plans. Since AHIP is a class act, what it put out was nothing so vulgar as a wish list. Rather, it was called “A Vision for Reform,” and its message was “We believe every American should have access to affordable health care coverage.”
In a letter that preceded the actual plan, senior officials of AHIP wrote, “This new plan would strengthen the health care safety net, enable all consumers to purchase health insurance with pre-tax dollars, provide financial assistance to help working families afford coverage, and encourage states to develop and implement access plans.”
It is a grand plan containing many interesting and valuable proposals. AHIP, and before it the Health Insurance Association of America, has long carried the torch on the issue of the uninsured.
My guess is that this plan–which the group worked on for some 7 months prior to its announcement–took on an increased sense of urgency because of the anticipation that the Democrats would make big gains in the midterm elections. And with those gains, they would use the issue of the uninsured to flog the health insurance business and put forth proposals for universal health coverage.
Not to mince any words, the vast numbers of people in this country that are without health insurance is a scandal of epic proportions. It is nothing less than a national shame for the richest country on earth to condone a situation where some 45 million of its citizens are without health insurance for at least part of any given year. It is also a shame that that astronomical number keeps growing year after year.
