The Big Reshuffling: Health Care Reform's Winners and Losers; Billions to Change Hands, to Little Net Effect
An article and chart in Sunday's Business section should have been credited the Urban Institute with a recent study on the impact of the Clinton health plan on different income classes. (Published 3/1/94)</br></br>No matter whose plan finally emerges from the congressional operating room, health care reform holds out the prospect of redistributing tens of billions of dollars each year throughout the economy, creating an array of winners and losers among American businesses and households.</br></br>Despite these huge shifts in income from some Americans to others, most economists have concluded that the gains and losses would largely cancel each other out. The nation's total employment, inflation, economic growth and balance of trade wouldn't be affected significantly.</br></br>So far, only President Clinton's plan has been subject to serious economic analysis. But because its goal - providing universal access to health insurance at affordable prices - is shared by all the major proposals, it's a useful baseline. The impacts of the competing proposals are likely to differ more in degree than direction.</br></br>Certainly no plan would generate a more complicated set of redistributions than the president's. A recent study by Lewin-VHI Inc., a health research firm in Fairfax, predicted the Clinton plan would have these effects in 1998: - Nearly one in four households would see their annual health care spending fall by more than $1,000 a year, while one in six would see it rise by that amount.