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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
I read everything you posted, and linked to. I read Kerry's website. I've read several policy papers from both sides on the issue. I can post without drooling. (Well, usually.)

(Okay, some times.)

C'mon.

Here is some of the article I posted earlier:

• While the Bush approach puts more of the onus of cost on the individual, John Kerry’s proposals aim to reduce and spread the costs of health insurance. Some provisions would make private plans more affordable, while other elements would expand public programs for low-income people. Kerry’s plan, unlike Clinton’s in 1993, calls for little institutional change and does not include any mandates. It uses new financing to stabilize and extend existing forms of coverage and to create incentives for greater efficiency. In this sense, his program is incrementalist -- “ambitious incrementalism” is the term that some have used to describe it. According to estimates by Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, Kerry’s proposals would cost $653 billion over 10 years and result in coverage of 27 million of the nation’s 45 million uninsured, raising the proportion of Americans with health insurance to about 95 percent. Unlike Bush, Kerry indicates how he would pay for his plan: The required revenue would come from rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent in income.
  
  To cut private insurance premiums, Kerry proposes that the government provide “stop-loss” protection to private plans, picking up 75 percent of the cost of catastrophic care. The threshold for this protection would be set so as to relieve private plans of 10 percent of their costs. In 2006, that level would be $30,000 in annual expenses for an individual, rising to $50,000 in 2013. Employers that wanted to get the stop-loss protection would need to have a certified disease-management program (aimed at controlling expenses and preventing recurrences for specific high-cost conditions such as heart disease). They would also have to offer health coverage to all their employees on a nondiscriminatory basis -- that is, if they pay 75 percent of premiums for some employees, they would have to extend the same offer to all.
  
  The stop-loss protection would have benefits to the public beyond the immediate savings of 10 percent. Reducing the risk of high-cost cases would make it less risky, and therefore cheaper, to insure small firms. All employers would have less incentive to discriminate against job seekers who are older or disabled or who have family members suffering from costly medical conditions. In the past, Blue Cross plans used to offer a single “community rate” to all firms, large and small. Competition did away with that practice. Under Kerry’s proposal, the government would, in effect, restore “community rating” for catastrophic medical care.
  
  In another measure aimed to increase the pooling of risk, Kerry would use the framework of the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program to create a national pool open to all employers to buy insurance. The federal program today offers government employees, including members of Congress, an array of private health-insurance plans (indeed, it has long been cited as a model of “managed competition”). Under Kerry’s proposal, private employers could also purchase health coverage through a parallel, albeit separate, pool.

Will this cost money? Yes. If there were a way to improve incentives meaningfully for free, I am willing to wager that even this President and Congress might have considered it. But the point of the 'stop-loss' protection is to improve the way that private insurance functions for the costs still covered, not to shift burdens to taxpayers. (Thus, the sentence I bolded.) The latter is a necessary evil, not the end served.