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Because Dean never started out with a plan at all when he started running. When Dean started running, he had a very vague suggestion about letting people without employment based insurance to but into either medicaid, if they were below the age of 55, and to buy into Medicare early if they were older than 55. This idea in itself did not originate with Dean but was part of the suggestion made by Kerry in 1995,along with another Senator. During the fight to try to get Clinton Care off the ground. AS a part of what eventually became "Kid Care". This plan originally started as a joint piece of legislation between Kerry and another Senator. Ted Kennedy then signed into the act as a senior sponsor, and the act known as the Kerry/Kennedy Act of 1996 was brought before Congress. This act was set up so that the federal government would pick up 75 percent of all of the cost of each state to provide health insurance for every child in each state in families that earned less than 225 percent of the federal poverty income level. DUring the congressional squalbbling, this level was raised to 300 percent of the federal poverty level. The main stipulation for the federal governent to provide finding the states to make sure that all children in every state was covered, was that the states would then pick up the cost to insure all adults in the states who did not have employment based health insurance by allowing all citizens of a state to buy into Medicaid, on a sliding scale. SO essentially, much of what became the health care system in Vermont, covering large percentages of children in that state was based on legislation and ideas proposed by John Kerry, and sponsored by Ted Kennedy. The adult portion of the legislation was killed by the Republicans, who had just taken over the House of Representatives, who started working with Senate Republicans to attempt to kill any social programs suggested by Democrats, particularly Clintons attempt to pass national health. IN order to do this, Orrin Hatch signed onto the Kerry/Kennedy Act, and as another senior senator, the act became known as the Kennecdy Hatch Act of 1996. Right now Conservaive based organizations are stating that Kerry's current health care plan is a simply dusting off of the Kerry/Kennedy Act of 1996, giving Kennedy Credit for the plan, which originated with Kerry: New Entitlements Kerry supports expanding eligibility to the State Children's Health Insurance Plan to age 24. This is a classic example of what used to be called "creeping socialism," as a program adopted in the name of saving children expanded to include adults. Proposals to lower the eligibility age for Medicare simultaneously encroach on the private market for health insurance from the other end of the age spectrum. Such policies pander to specific demographic groups by promising them something for nothing and advance the goal of creating a nationalized health care system, but as sound public policy they are sorely lacking. Government health care programs cause prices and unnecessary utilization of services to rise, reward cost-shifting and waste, and eventually lead to busted budgets and painful efforts to ration access to care. States are struggling with record deficits, to which the already high cost of SCHIP contributes. Expanding the program further would require massive federal subsidies ... from a federal government also awash in debt. And Medicare, newspaper headlines remind us, is already forecast to be bankrupt in 15 years. New Mandates rry has also dusted off Kennedy's old scheme of mandating that all employers provide health coverage to their employees. His plan would accompany the mandate with a carrot by having the federal government reimburse employer health plans for 75 percent of the catastrophic costs above $50,000.Details are a bit sketchy right now, but one has to assume insurance companies would get the reimbursement, since employers do not pay for the medical care.
Mandating employer-sponsored health insurance creates it own set of problems. It destroys jobs by encouraging employers to substitute machinery for unskilled labor or to send jobs overseas. It ties health insurance to employers in an age when people are less likely than ever to stay with a single employer for very long, and when employers are recognizing they lack the expertise to act as health insurance companies for their employees. Having the government take over catastrophic health costs gives employers less incentive to manage health care spending, fueling the upward spending spiral.
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=14622
The latest rage is the Kennedy-Hatch so-called "kid-care" bill. Remarkably, erstwhile "conservative" Sen. Orrin Hatch has teamed up with that liberal icon of I-could-care-less irresponsibility, Sen. Ted Kennedy, to propose a new entitlement program that would pay for children's health insurance.
Under this Great Society-style program, the federal government will provide grants to each state to cover 80-90 percent of the cost of the program. The states would then effectively provide health insurance vouchers that each eligible family could use to buy insurance for their children from private insurers. Mr. Hatch apparently thinks this makes the proposal conservative. But a massive increase in new welfare spending as Mr. Hatch has proposed is not conservative, regardless of how it is structured.
After Republicans rightly sought to restrict the growth of Medicaid in last year's budget, Mr. Hatch's proposal would effectively be a massive increase in Medicaid to cover children in families above the poverty line and in the middle class. The increased spending from Mr. Hatch's new welfare entitlement would dwarf the welfare spending reductions the Republicans achieved last year. In the face of the looming entitlement crisis, the childish irresponsibility of this proposal is breathtaking.
http://www.cato.org/dailys/5-05-97.html
Later, as other candidates began to reveal aspects of their own health care plans, Deans lack of planning became obvious.
First, when Dick Gephardt criticized Deans ideas for funding national health, by pointing out that Deans tax ideas would penalize those businesses who were already trying to do the right thing and provide health care for employees, as Deans first ideas for fundin universal health care only gave tax incentives to companies that are curently not providing health insurance programs for their employees. Later,prior to Kerry putting togetther a comprenhensive package, Dean, after doing a little research, inserted into his own ideas about universal health the idea of allowing citizens to buy into the federal health insurance program, an idea which both Kennedy, Kerry and another Democratic Senator, who I can no longer remember, but who was the co-author of the original legislation with Kerry in 1995. ut again ,the ideas were noted as dangerous trends by a conservative journal in 1997, while Kerry, Kennedy, and other democrats were fighting to retain as much of the progressive nature of Kid Care as possible:
Beware Kidcare
by Michael Tanner and Naomi Lopez
Michael Tanner is director of health and welfare studies and Naomi Lopez is an entitlements policy analyst with the Cato Institute.
Like the monster in a Hollywood horror film, the idea of government-run health care never seems to stay dead for long. Proponents of its latest manifestation, KidCare, are fabricating a crisis of uninsured children to promote a new multi-billion-dollar health care entitlement program for families earning as much as $75,000 per year.
Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) recently announced a $3 billion to $4 billion per year proposal that would subsidize 90 percent of private health insurance premiums for families with annual incomes up to twice the federal poverty level and provide smaller subsidies for wealthier families -- those that earn up to $75,000 per year. Another proposal unveiled by Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) would establish federal-state-private partnerships in which states, using federal dollars, would purchase private "child-only" coverage at an annual cost of about $9 billion. Premiums would be fully covered for families with incomes up to 185 percent of the federal poverty level and completely phased out for families above three times the poverty level -- over $45,000 for a family of four. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) offered a similar proposal that would completely phase out the credit at 235 percent of the federal poverty level over $35,000 for a family of four -- at an annual cost of $4.8 billion.
http://www.cato.org/dailys/2-11-97.html
Kerry's earliest support of national health care came from the UFCW, who first presented demands for legislation that mandated employers must provide health insurance for all employees. It was Kerry's initial support of this program that has made UFCW oneof his largest backers. This union has actively supported and fought to get both Ted Kennedy and John Kerry relected to their senate seats ever since:
Kerry co-sponsored the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. Legislation giving tribes the authority to issue school improvement bonds. Legislation giving Native American children dental care under Medicaid and the CHIP program. And the Native American Small Business Development Act.
He has fought to raise the minimum wage, cosponsored bills to outlaw striker replacement and provide workers with Family and Medical Leave to spend time with a new child or care for a family member. He has helped beat back Republican efforts to gut OSHA, weaken worker safety rules and cut funds from worker training and employment programs
http://www.democrats.us/beta/forum/view_topic.php?id=99&forum_id=12&page=15
Kerry and Kennedy's ideas about providing national health care by allowing the public to buy into the federal insurance plan was developed in 1995 as a result of the final failure of the Clintons to pass their Clinton Care program, an entitlement program that Gingrich and the Contract with America insisted could not be afforded without either creating a huge deficit, or raising taxes. By allowing citizens to pay fo the insurance directly, on a sliding scale, according to income, paying for those below certain levels was an idea created to prevent the neo conservative movement from killing the idea of providing health coverage for the large percentage of American who had no coverage at all.
If you go back to the period in which Vermont developed its health care programs, you will note that Dean did not start the program that provided large scale health care for children, but the program was passed into law in 1989, several years before he became governor, and that the program was the idea of a Vermontpolitician of a rather different political stripe than Howar Dean, named Con Hogan. After Dy Dynasaur came into existance, it was largely through the efforts of Ted Kennedy, and John Kerry, that the program was able to be expanded while Dean was governor, due to the expanded funding for states to provide health care to children under programs like the SCHIP program, and Kid Care. Dean was able to provide health care for children of families up to 300 percent above the poverty level largely by cutting back on health care programs for single adults, single disabled adults, Married disabled or elderlyt couples without children, and so on. By and large, the statistics on the percentage of people vocered by health insurance in Vermont during all of the years Dean was governor did not change at all. During five out of the 11 years Dean was governor, the percentage of people without health insurance grew significantly, and all but one or two years, the percentage of people who did have coverage never rose above the levels that existed before Dean became governor, and during those one or two years, the increase was negligible. For tha most part, what Dean did was shift coverage, rather than increase it. All of this was due to program and ideas that Dean had no part in, and funding ideas from the Clinton Administration.
I remember when Dean first started running for the presidency listening to his ideas about universal health insurance and noted, that pretty much all he was doing was extending medicaid to people at much higher levels above federal poverty levels, which was not a new idea, but had been suggested a number of times in a number of situation during the period when Clinton's idea for national health care failed, and Congressional democrats attempted to put the pieces back together to provide something, coming up with some core ideas that could be retained for future reference when attempting to work on national health care again.
John Kerry played a large role in this effort, during the mid to late 90's along with Ted Kennedy. His current ideas about national health are picking up where Democrats left off when Clinton Care failed.
By having portions of these ideas already embedded within parts of existing legislation, such as the SCHP programs and Kid Care, the task of expanding health care to adults becomes so much easier.
But if you go back and follow the history of Deans health care ideas, there is very little that originated with Dean in any way. He largely lifted ideas that others worked on and floated around congress and Washington during the fiscal growth during the Clinton administration.
So ues, I would say it is like Dean plan, as Deans plan was pretty much a patchwork of the ideas that democratic congressmen, like Kerry, Kennedy, Gephardt, Kucinich, included, UCFW and other labor organizations, and in fact, the Governors of a number of other staes who put together similar programs at the same time that the federal government provided an expansion for funding health care for children, but who came from much larger states with smaller tax bases. (Vermont, at the time Dean was governor had the 3rd largest tax base per citizen in the United States, and still Dean needed to cut services to the elderly and handicapped, and try to totally cut cost of living increases to the medical and other services these people recived in order to fund the insuraing of children of families far better off financially than many of the people that were having their benefits cuts becasue they did not have children).
Yes since Dean incorporated Kerry's idea of allowing individuals to buy into the federal program, Kerry's plan resembles Deans. Only Kerry did not release a plan until he had laid all of it out completely, how it would be funded, who would be elegible to have the government pick up percentages of the cost, what those percentages would be..sliding scales and such.
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