A healthcare reform expert says it's difficult to figure out how Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's universal healthcare policy could cover millions of Americans for less money.
Former President Bill Clinton boasted recently on the campaign trail that his wife was the only presidential candidate helping to get healthcare costs under control. The Clintons claim that the presidential candidate's proposed universal plan would cap health insurance premiums at 5 to 10 percent of Americans' income. Healthcare reform expert Gracie Marie Turner of the Galen Institute says although adding 47 million more people to the nation's healthcare system is a laudable goal, the way Senator Clinton (D-New York) is proposing to achieve that objective will not bring down costs. "The plan that she is proposing would first of all mandate that everyone have health insurance, and she -- under pressure from Tim Russert -- acknowledged that one of the ways to enforce that may be garnishing people's wages and really forcing them to pay," she warns. "But the policy that they would require is a very generous health insurance policy -- in some ways, more generous than [the policy] members of Congress receive." Turner says the Clintons may be promising they would make sure no one pays more than ten percent of their income in health insurance premiums, but a lot of Americans are scratching their heads as to where that 10 percent would come from in the first place. The healthcare reform expert also notes that the average price of a family policy offered through the workplace is $12,000 a year. So she argues that to afford that type of coverage under Clinton, one would have to make a yearly wage of $120,000. Turner also questions if taxes would be raised to make up any shortfall -- should Clinton's plan require more than 10 percent of one's income. Turner says she finds it hard to believe that Clinton's universal healthcare plan is the kind of healthcare reform Americans are talking about when they say they want the system to be "fixed."
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