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Ben Carson presidential campaign, 2016/Healthcare
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 Ben Carson |
Retired Pediatric Neurosurgeon |
 Republican candidate: |
2028 • 2024 • 2020 • 2016 |
This page was current as of the 2016 election.
- At the tenth Republican debate in Houston, Texas, on February 25, 2016, Carson discussed the details of his healthcare plan, saying, “Well, first of all, healthcare is not a right. But I do believe it is a responsibility for a responsible society, and we are that. We spend almost twice as much per capita on healthcare as many other nations who have actually much better access than we do. I propose a system in which we use health empowerment accounts, which are like a health savings account with no bureaucrats. And we give it to everybody from birth until death. They can pass it on when they die. We pay for it with the same dollars that we pay for traditional healthcare with. We give people the ability to shift money within their health empowerment account within their family. So dad's $500 short, mom can give it to him or a cousin or uncle. And it makes every family their own insurance carrier with no middle man. It gives you enormous flexibility. And also, you know, if Uncle Joe is smoking like a chimney, everybody's going to hide his cigarettes because they're all interested in what's going on there. Also, the -- your catastrophic healthcare is going to cost a lot less money now because the only thing coming out of that is catastrophic healthcare. So, it's like a homeowners policy with a large deductible, versus a homeowners policy where you want every scratch covered. One costs $1,500 a year; one costs $10,000 a year. You can buy the $1,500 one. That will take care of 75 percent of the people. The people who are indigent, how do we take care of them now? Medicaid. What's the Medicaid budget? Almost $500 billion; almost 80 million people participate, which is way too many, and that will get a lot better when we fix the economy, which I hope we get a chance to talk about. But do the math. Over $5,000 for each man, woman and child, and all -- they will have a lot more flexibility. What could you buy with that? A concierge practice. And you could still have thousands of dollars left over. And let me just finish, because I don't get to talk that much. And, you know, let's... you can have the money that's left over to buy your catastrophic insurance. But most importantly, we give them a menu, just like we do in Medicare Part C, and they have the choices that will allow them not only to have catastrophic health care, but drug care and everything else. It will be such a good program that nobody will want Obamacare after that, and that's probably the best way do it, although if anybody still did, I would still de-fund it.”[2]
- At the eighth Republican presidential primary debate on February 6, 2016, Ben Carson talked about his opposition to Obamacare: "The reason that I dislike Obamacare is because the government comes in and tells the people -- which the nation is supposed to be centered on -- that we don't care what you think, this is what we're doing. And if you don't like it, too bad. That's a problem. And we can't afford to do that because that will fundamentally change America. I have proposed a health empowerment account system. Everybody gets a health empowerment account the day they are born, they keep it until they die. They can pass it on. We pay for it with the same dollars that we pay for traditional health care with, recognizing that we spend twice as much as many countries per capita and health care and don't have as such [sic] access. We give people the ability to shift money within their health empowerment account so that each family basically becomes its own insurance company without a middleman; that saves you a[n] awful lot of money."[3]
- Carson wrote an op-ed in The Boston Globe on December 15, 2015, to highlight his proposal to create “Health Empowerment Accounts” (HEAs). He wrote that they “will be available to anyone with a valid Social Security number. These accounts will be owned specifically by the individual and not by the government or large corporations. The accounts will also remain with the owner through job changes or state-to-state relocation. HEAs will be created for every child at birth and are freely transferable from one family member to another.”[4]
- Carson released his healthcare reform policy on December 9, 2015. At the core of Carson’s platform was the combination of tax-protected “health empowerment accounts” and high-deductible health insurance plans. Additionally, Carson’s plan supported transferable plans across state lines and family members, a fixed contribution for Medicare beneficiaries to select the insurance plan of their choice, and the gradual increase of the eligibility age for Medicare to 70. Carson's plan also called for overhauling Medicaid, the joint federal-state health program for the poor, giving users private insurance options, which would be funded through state-run Medicaid programs, and seed funds for their own health empowerment accounts.[5] [6]
- Carson was criticized by his opponents, including Donald Trump and John Kasich, over his once-held position on ending Medicare.[7]
- Carson changed his mind on his Medicare proposal. Carson has said he wanted to dismantle the national social insurance program for the elderly and replace it with a private voucher system. “The answer is of course NO,” Carson wrote in a recent Facebook post, responding to a questioner in Ohio who wanted to know if he wanted to abolish Medicare. He insisted that the notion that he wanted to do away with the program was simply the result of “press attacks” and that he would soon offer a plan to “save money and deliver better service to our nation’s seniors.”[8]
- Carson said he would use health savings accounts to reduce the need for government assistance programs like Medicare and Medicaid. He argued on October 25, 2015, “Using health savings accounts starting from the time you are born until the time you die largely eliminates the need for people to be dependent on government programs like that.”[9]
- Although Carson expressed a desire to repeal Obamacare, in July 2015, he called its ban on barring people with pre-existing conditions from purchasing insurance “one of the very few bright spots in an otherwise horribly written law.”[10]
- According to a January 2015 BuzzFeed report, Carson "proposed government-run nationalized catastrophic care and end-of-life national guidelines for who should and should not receive care" in a 1996 paper in the Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health. He "advocated a nearly-identical proposal to reform health care in his 2012 book, America the Beautiful" and "outlined the same approach in his 2000 book, The Big Picture, and in a 2009 speech to the Hood Hargett Breakfast Club."[11]
- In a July 2014 article in The Washington Times, Carson argued for the implementation of health savings accounts. He wrote, "Most people will want to get the biggest bang for the buck and will independently seek out both value and quality. That, in turn, will bring all aspects of medicine into the free-market economic model, thus automatically having an ameliorating effect on pricing transparency and quality of outcomes. ...It would also eliminate two-tiered systems of health care, making every patient equally desirable from a business perspective. There should be no limit to the amount of money that can be contributed to and managed in an account. Money unspent at the end of the year should simply continue to accumulate without penalty." According to Carson, funds would begin accumulating at birth and money could be shifted among family member's accounts as needed.[12]
- In July 2014, Carson wrote, "The bottom line: Health care for all of our citizens is the responsibility of a compassionate society and is well within our grasp if we don’t make it into a political football."[12]
- In April 2014, Sen. Rand Paul invited Carson to Washington to discuss health savings accounts with a group of House Republicans.[13]
- In October 2013, Carson said that the Affordable Care Act was "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. ...It is slavery in a way because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control."[14]
- In April 2014, he reaffirmed his statement. He said, "I think people need to inform themselves so that they’re able to assess what they hear. They need to think, why would someone say that? It’s not because he thinks slavery wasn’t that bad; it’s because he thinks Obamacare is that bad."[14]
- According to Politico, Carson expressed his support for health savings accounts. He argued that "everyone should be insured. ...The only responsibility of the government would be providing $2,000 per year for every American citizen—around $630 billion annually, about 20 percent of what we currently spend on health care—to provide everyone with a health savings account. I would encourage employers to add to it as well."[14]
- In his book, America the Beautiful, Carson proposed having the government oversee catastrophic healthcare in the same way that the Federal Emergency Management Agency oversees natural disasters.[11]
- Carson was the chairman of Save Our Healthcare Project. Its PAC, American Legacy PAC, was established to raise funds "to build public support for a series of patient-centered reforms to replace Obamacare, and elect new representatives in Washington committed to implementing them."[15]
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See also
Footnotes
- ↑ USA Today, "Report: Ben Carson to run for president," May 3, 2015
- ↑ The Washington Post, "The CNN-Telemundo Republican debate transcript, annotated," February 25, 2016
- ↑ The Washington Post, "Transcript of the New Hampshire GOP debate, annotated," February 6, 2016
- ↑ The Boston Globe, "A prescription for health reform," December 15, 2015
- ↑ The Washington Post, "Ben Carson pitches repealing Obamacare, raising Medicare eligibility age in health reform plan," December 9, 2015
- ↑ The Huffington Post, "Everything You Need To Know About Ben Carson's Health Care Plan," December 9, 2015
- ↑ Politico, "Ben Carson's Medicare muddle," November 4, 2015
- ↑ MSNBC, "Carson changes his mind on abolishing Medicare," October 26, 2015
- ↑ The Wall Street Journal, "Ben Carson Would Reshape, Not Eliminate, Medicare and Medicaid," October 25, 2015
- ↑ Washington Examiner, "The one piece of Obamacare Ben Carson would save," July 23, 2015
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Buzzfeed, "Ben Carson Advocated Partial Government Health Care Takeover In His 2012 Book," accessed March 2, 2015
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Washington Times, "CARSON: Health savings accounts far better than Obamacare," accessed March 2, 2015
- ↑ Washington Times, “Paging Dr. Carson! GOP makes House call for surgeon to replace Obamacare," April 3, 2014
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Politico, "Who is Dr. Ben Carson," accessed March 2, 2015
- ↑ American Legacy PAC, "Projects," accessed March 3, 2015
