Excerpts from transcript on Health Care Reform
Shaping health care ref
JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, where do you come down on all this?
MARK SHIELDS: Come down on the plan itself?
JUDY WOODRUFF: On -- on -- yes.
MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think that -- I think that David's identified what the problem is.
I think that there's one complication. And that is, the Republicans this week indicated that they aren't -- that they are not going to come up with an alternative, and they are basically going to play no ball. They're going to -- and -- and I think, when we got the announcement that the Chamber of Congress has come up with $100 million that they are going to preserve the private sector with, starting with health insurance and opposing the public plan, but the -- I think the public plan is necessary, a necessary ingredient to the Obama plan, because, Judy, what we have in health care right now is the failure of -- of the private -- of private enterprise at work.
I mean it does not -- we cannot cover 48 million people. I mean, it does not. It is -- it's too much. The cost is too prohibitive. So, there has to be some means of covering people who cannot afford a private plan.
David identifies a very key problem. And that is, if it's open-ended, and the government is just going to write a check, and it doesn't have to meet a balance sheet each year, the public plan, then that -- that is a threat to the private insurance plans. And I think they will fight it tooth and toenail.
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DAVID BROOKS: But, essentially, I -- I think we need to adjust that, because it is the most generous tax giveaway in the tax code.
It is skewed incredibly toward the rich. And, most importantly, it cuts off any relationship between what we -- we get and what we pay for. And, therefore, it drives health care inflation. So, there was a panel a couple months ago in which the experts, almost all of them, were for it.
The politicians, almost all of them, are against it, because it is raising taxes.
MARK SHIELDS: Right now -- and the argument is, politically, on the part of the some Democrats, oh, my gosh, we would be retreating, because John McCain did advocate this.
What they would not do is a tax exclusion. They -- they would put in a limit, for example, starting at $10,400, as some have suggested, which is the average contribution made by companies. Where -- where it began, interestingly enough, was, during World War II, there was a wage freeze. And, so, in order to increase the benefits to workers, as -- as the economy perked along, they gave out health care.
And it was -- it was, in fact, tax-exempt. And it was -- and it is indefensible, in the long run, to be tax-exempt.
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