Adam Searing likes most of the Governor’s healthcare budget. (Should we be surprised?) Some of his comments on the budget, however, reveal weaknesses in his overall position on government-distorted healthcare:
First, he lauds Easley’s further attempts to expand medicaid:
The Governor does budget for anticipated growth in NC Health Choice, finding an additional $10 million to help enroll another 10,000 or so kids. [blah, blah…] This is doubly important as tough economic times increase, causing many families to lose the insurance coverage they have through their jobs.
Funny, Adam Searing isn’t worried about people losing their jobs in this healthcare video, where he explicitly opposes $2500/$5000 (person/family) refundible tax credits so people can get health insurance (using the old rebuttal-by-dishonesty technique, as I point out here.). Hello. If you lose your job, you don’t lose your health insurance when you get it on the individual market. (Searing also doesn’t seem to be too concerned about the 50-60% of eligible children (read: poor) not yet enrolled in Medicaid. What about them?)
Do I smell partisanship? Or is it simply a profound lack of concern for families who lose their insurance when they lose their jobs. Either way, it suggests that Searing is complicit in the left’s grand strategy to choke healthcare markets beyond recognition and keep people trapped in job-based insurance via an unfair subsidy. (Why would they do this? They want us to cry ‘uncle’ so they can foist single-payer on us.)
Oh, and here’s the funniest bit. He doesn’t like Easley’s cigarette tax suggestion:
Biggest misstep – increasing the cigarette tax by 20 cents. Give me a break. We’ve only known since dinosaurs roamed the land where the Legislative Office Building now sits that any rise in the price of a pack of smokes of less than 10% has no effect whatsoever on getting people to quit. Otherwise, it’s just a tax on smokers, God bless them, and has no beneficial health effects. Here’s a novel suggestion – raise the cigarette tax by $1. Then put the several hundred million you generate into first guaranteeing an affordable health plan with sliding scale premiums for every child in NC, eliminating the provider fee cut above, and a tax rebate targeted at people who’ve just lost their jobs. We stop thousands of kids from starting to smoke and we generate more money besides.
Whoa. I don’t know what smells funniest in that passage–the inherent paternalism, the audacity of the a $1tax, or the economic backwardness behind his revenue predictions for such a big tax. Anyway, I love it when the left attempts to be anything but emotional and linear. The arguments unravel themselves.
-Max Borders
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