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NPR's "Morning Edition" on Friday looked at proposals by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) to limit wellness care costs.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior economic adviser, said that the candidate's plan to provide tax credits to help people buy health insurance would result in about 20 million to 30 zillion more insured person people. He said, "It's going to be $5,000 toward every family's purchase of health insurance, something that basically would be a non-event for people already getting insurance from their employer. But for those who are buying it out of pocket, a lot of help at that place." The plan also aims to help people with pre-existing health conditions world Health Organization cannot discover affordable coverage, McCain has said. According to Holtz-Eakin, the plan would be budget-neutral because its costs would be balanced by a tax on contributions by employers towards health benefits. He declined to project how the contrive would strike U.S. wellness spending, NPR reports.
Obama's be after, which would require many employers to contribute to workers' health insurance, eventually would deoxidise health spending by 8%, David Cutler, Obama's health adviser, aforementioned. The be after would not deny anyone coverage. Cutler said, "What we estimation is that Sen. Obama's health design would reduce the cost of health care by about $2,500 for a typical family. That's a combination of direct out-of-pocket costs that the family no longer has to make and exchange premium payments from their employers that families are now paying in the lour wages that they receive." In improver, with nest egg in government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, the government would not need to collect as much in taxes to run those programs, NPR reports.
Both candidates have suggested increasing the availability of preventive forethought, promoting less-expensive generic prescription drugs and developing health information engineering science as shipway to further reduce wellness spending, NPR reports. Uwe Reinhardt, a health economic expert at Princeton University, said such methods likely testament not foreshorten health care costs in the long term, although they volition "enhance caliber of animation" and supply more value for outlay. He added that generic medications currently are widely used and that health care IT is expensive to implement and maintain (Silberner, "Morning Edition," NPR, 8/22).
Reprinted with tolerant permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You hind end view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for e-mail delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.
