While Roy Blunt has been busy lining the pokets of his corporate
contributors, Jim Newberry is hard at working coming up with REAL ways to help people.
The Springfield News-Leader has this article on Jim Newberry's vision for a more effective American healtchare system in this morning's paper.
http://springfield.news-leader.com/news/today/1028-Newberryta-213142.html
Published October 28, 2004
Newberry tackles health care system
By Matt Wagner
News-Leader Staff
A national cooperative is the best way to make health insurance more affordable for Americans, Democratic congressional candidate Jim Newberry said Wednesday.
A member-controlled, nonprofit health plan could be chartered and initially paid for by the federal government, said the Springfield attorney running against Republican U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt for the 7th District seat.
Membership wouldn't be based on employment -- a change Newberry said would save companies money and enfranchise more than 40 million uninsured Americans.
"You can put choice into the system," he said. "It is a free-enterprise approach."
Newberry called the current system a "patchwork" that benefits powerful politicians like Blunt and insurance companies but hurts physicians and patients.
Blunt spokeswoman Burson Taylor criticized Newberry's proposal as "short on details but very long on cost."
Congressman Blunt has long favored tax-free health-savings accounts for workers and associated health plans that give small businesses group-buying power to stabilize premiums, Taylor said.
Such plans may offer more flexibility to employees, but they don't address the larger problems of accessibility and affordability, Newberry said.
"Most people feel, as I do, that health care should be a right, not a privilege," he said.
Government and profit-driven private interests must be removed from the equation, Newberry said.
An independent board similar to the Federal Reserve could set the cooperative's premiums, which would be lower because profit margins wouldn't be a factor, Newberry explained.
But Taylor said Newberry's notion of a nationalized health cooperative is half-baked.
"Who is going to govern it if the federal government isn't?" she said. "There's no incentive for hospitals or pharmaceutical companies to keep their costs low."
Added Taylor: "That is a recipe for increased costs and decreased competition."
A similar approach to health care espoused by the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s wasn't well-received for those reasons and others, she said.
"It's something Americans have turned their back on a number of times."
Newberry acknowledged the proposal is far from perfect, but said the health care crisis calls for an innovative solution that hasn't been polluted by politics.
"It's out of control," he said. "It's not going to be solved until (lawmakers) think creatively about this."
Libertarian Kevin Craig of Powersite and Constitution Party candidate Steve Alger are also running for the 7th District seat.