Health Insurance? Help Us Afford It

The Associated Press has reported that the health insurance industry is offering "for the first time to curb its controversial practice of charging higher premiums to people with a history of medical problems."

If you've ever had a medical problem, then lost a job or started a small business and tried to buy individual health coverage, you likely have run into this little problem:

If you need it, you really can't afford it.

Republicans have long pushed for "market solutions" to the health insurance problem. And the "solutions" the market keeps delivering tend to be priced somewhere beyond sky-high.

According to the AP article posted by CBS News, "[a]bout 7 percent of Americans buy their coverage as individuals, while more than 60 percent have job-based insurance."

The percentage for individuals likely would be much higher if monthly premiums for health insurance did not rival or exceed mortgage payments and car payments. Meanwhile, people with employer-provided health insurance are paying sharply higher premiums and co-payments and getting squeezed hard, too.

"The offer here is to transition away from risk rating, which is one of the things that makes life hell for real people," health economist Len Nichols of the New America Foundation public policy center told the AP. "They have never in their history offered to give up risk rating."

According to the AP report on the CBS News site, insurers hope to head off the creation of a government insurance plan that would compete with them, something that liberals and many Democrats are pressing for.

The AP report did not mention that Republicans long have opposed government-sponsored health insurance plans, touting vague "market solutions," instead. These are the same "market solutions" that have helped keep many of the 47 million or so uninsured Americans priced out of the health-insurance market and in the "if you need it, you can't afford it" category.

The current offers from the insurance industry fall short in one very big category: small business, which creates the vast majority of new jobs in the American economy. Small businesses, under the new proposal, would have to keep paying higher premiums and deal with risk ratings. One sick employee could send premiums through the roof.

So the news on risk ratings seems to be significant, but now is not the time for the Obama Administration to ease off on its health-insurance plans. If anything, the White House needs to ratchet up its proposals and keep holding the health-insurance industry's feet to the fire.

-- Si Dunn

Has the Clinton Campaign Now Become Bosnian Toast? If Memory Serves Me…

By Si Dunn

Can you accurately remember what you did 12 years ago or longer? How about things you did last week? Or last night?

CBS News recently has been pounding on Hillary Clinton for claiming to have been under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996, when their old videos seem to show her mainly receiving incoming flowers and handshakes after arriving in a very dangerous area.

Memories can, as the old saying goes, play unfortunate tricks on you. One case in point: A close Hillary Clinton ally, retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, and I were friends in junior high school. (I am briefly mentioned in one of his books.) For years after he became a famous military leader and presidential candidate, I enjoyed telling people how he and I also had been close friends in elementary school and how he, on more than one occasion, interceded with the principal and saved me from being paddled for misbehaving.

The only problem is, when I met up with Gen. Clark again last year at a Dallas political fundraiser and brought this memory up, he assured me that he and I had attended different elementary schools and didn’t even know each other until the 7th grade. (I have to believe Wesley on this, because 50 years after he edited the school newspaper at Pulaski Heights Junior High School, he still can recite my best times in the 440-yard dash.)

Somebody helped me get off that hook with my elementary school principal, and, obviously, I can’t recall who did it. But it was easy, years later, to conveniently insert Wesley Clark into that scenario, then let the combination meld into a warm memory that I honestly came to believe.

I think Hillary Clinton fell into a similar memory trap, one that snares us all at times. To her credit, she now has admitted that she “made a mistake" and added: "That happens. It proves I'm human, which you know, for some people, is a revelation."

If CBS News and other media outlets tried hard enough, they could search back through past videos of all candidates and come up with numerous snippets where memories or claims do not mesh with reality.

Meanwhile, if you asked me at this moment to tell you something I did 12 years ago, I could state with complete accuracy that I had some meals and brushed my teeth. And I probably did not do these things while under sniper fire. But who knows? Maybe a celery stick or my toothbrush was blown out of my hand, and I simply forgot?

I really was in some combat during the Vietnam War. But I didn’t shoot anybody, and only one bullet (sniper fire!) came within 50 feet of me. Still, if I were running for high (or low) office, my campaign staff could intone with complete accuracy: “He saw combat in Vietnam.” My eager supporters then might imagine me dashing into a Viet Cong stronghold with automatic weapons blazing in each hand.

Yet the truth would be this: I watched planes drop bombs nearby. I saw ships fire their guns. I observed Marines hitting the beach. And I was scrutinzing a nearby hillside--gawking like a tourist, actually--when the sniper’s bullet thudded into a metal armor plate.

I did fire some weapons a couple of times during the Vietnam War. My booming bullets made puny little splashes in the Tonkin Gulf and hit absolutely nothing except maybe a poor fish or two. Yet it’s possible two evil North Vietnamese frogmen might have been right under the waves and I got them both with my shots.

I think a heroic new memory may be taking shape.

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