Guiliani's flip-flop on health insurance for kids.

This is an article from Slate about Guiliani and his experience with health care as mayor of New York. Rudy has made a habit of chastising 'socialized medicine' as a rallying cry for the base of the Republicans. He also had a campaign ad that said he would have died from his Prostate cancer had he been involved in a government sponsored health care system instead of the US system.

This article paints a different story about Rudy's positions as Mayor of New York when he was first diagnosed with cancer. Before he was diagnosed with cancer he had little interest in the health care system. After he was diagnosed, he attempted to expand New York City's role in health care by expanding their program by three times without caring how much it cost the taxpayer. The system in place is called Health Stat and increased spending on government sponsored health care to children and adults who did not qualify for medicaid by $390 million over four years.

This is another example of the difficulty that Republicans have in considering him to be a conservative candidate. While he says the right things now, his record shows a history of being very similar to the Democratic positions on important platform issues. Hopefully it will all work out, but if this part of his record is any indication, I do not think he will be able to beat Hillary Clinton for the White House after having positions that are so close to hers.

It is a good article. Enjoy.

Sick Man

Guiliani's flip-flop on health insurance for kids.

By Sara Mosle

In his campaign for president, Rudolph Giuliani keeps suggesting that his experience as a prostate cancer survivor makes him uniquely qualified to evaluate the American health care system. To judge from his recent pronouncements, the lesson he learned as a cancer patient is that America has the best health care system in the world. Indeed, Giuliani has implied that without it, he wouldn't have survived cancer. He thus sees little need, in his prescriptions for reform, for overhauling the system or greatly reducing the number of uninsured. What's odd about Giuliani's take is that it is diametrically opposed to what he said he learned from his prostate cancer in 2000, at the time of his actual diagnosis and treatment.

Before his illness, Giuliani the Mayor resembled Giuliani the Presidential Candidate. Both showed little interest in expanding coverage to New York's poor or uninsured, and both Giulianis gave only tepid support and financial backing to an S-CHIP-style program for New York's uninsured children. By Giuliani's own description, however, all that changed when he came face-to-face with his own mortality.

At a packed and emotional news conference in May 2000, in which he announced he was dropping out of the race for the U.S. Senate as a result of his illness, Giuliani admitted to suddenly seeing the world very differently. He said his illness had changed him and that he wanted to reach out to minority groups and the poor. Most important, he said, he had newfound respect, understanding, and empathy for the city's uninsured. It seems Giuliani couldn't feel people's pain until he, well—literally—felt people's pain. But once he had, he stated that extending health insurance coverage to more of the city's uninsured was his top goal for his remaining 18 months in office. ''One of the things that I felt from the beginning of [my illness] and continue to feel is a tremendous sense of compassion for the people that have to make decisions like this alone," he explained. "One of the things maybe that I can do is figure out how we accelerate making sure that people are covered."

Continue reading the article here.