Rudolph Giuliani is one of the top tier candidates for the Republican nomination because of one thing, 9/11. Yet to run for President one should have detailed policy positions for a whole host of different issues that are important to Americans. Health care is without a doubt an important concern for voters and Rudy is willing to talk about it, but only to bash Democrats, not to actually provide real answers to the problems that millions of people face, no matter if they are insured or not.
From The American Prospect:
I'm supposed to be writing about Rudy Giuliani's health care plan today. And I would, if Rudy Giuliani had a health care plan. But Rudy Giuliani doesn't have a health care plan. What he has is a pretext with which to attack the Democrats. Indeed, just about all you need to know about Giuliani's thoughtfulness on the issue can be summed up by the following: In the speech introducing and detailing his new health care proposal, Giuliani refers to the "Democrats" six times. "Single-payer" is said eight times. "Socialized medicine," or some variant thereof, makes nine appearances. "Uninsured" is never uttered -- not once.But we'll get to the speech in a moment. First, it's worth wondering why anyone is even crediting Giuliani with a health care plan. The New York Times headlined their story "Giuliani Seeks to Transform U.S. Health Care Coverage," before telling us, in the tenth paragraph, that "Mr. Giuliani's speech offered very little in the way of specifics. He said his goal was to outline his 'vision,' with more details to come in the fall." I guess the headline "Giuliani Seeks to Transform One-Seventh of Economy, Couldn't Be Bothered to Offer Details on How" wasn't snappy enough?
Failure of the press aside, let's examine this "vision." What Giuliani offered is this: A tax exclusion of up to $15,000 for families, and $7,500 for individuals, to help pay for health care. What Giuliani is relying on is people reading those numbers -- $15,000 and $7,500 -- without noticing that they don't denote the amount of money he's offering them, but the amount of money he's not taxing them on. And when we plug it into my magical Rudy Translation Machine (constructed with the help of friendly neighborhood economist, Dean Baker), we can watch how $15,000 can easily become … zero.
Zero is the number on a scale of one to ten the amount of time Giuliani spends thinking about providing a real plan to fix our nation's health care crisis. The numbers he touts are misleading at best and most likely intentional distortions to make an appearance of having a plan. It seems he is more concerned about raising money from the industries that want to keep the status quo. In fact, he has raised almost a million dollars from health industries alone.
Expect more hot air out of his mouth, while his campaign bank account is fattened by corporate America that loves to hand him cold hard cash.
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