aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama & Health Care

This one’s been gone round and round but I have to say I liked the way Melissa Block and Julie Rovner captured it on All Things Considered yesterday. Clinton’s been claiming that Obama’s plan will leave out 15 million people:

BLOCK: Julie. Is that number correct?

ROVNER: Well, Senator Obama and his experts certainly don’t think so. They think that they can cover almost all of the uninsured simply with a voluntary system. But most of the economists say that you can’t do that. That you need some sort of a mandate. And in fact, the urban institute came out with a study just a couple of weeks ago that said having a voluntary system like the one that Senator Obama has proposed would in fact leave uncovered about fifteen and a half million people. So that number is pretty close to what Senator Clinton has been saying.

BLOCK: So, then, Senator Obama raises the question that if you have a plan to mandate insurance for everyone, how do you go about enforcing that?

ROVNER: That’s right, and that’s been his main argument against Senator Clinton’s plan, what it would mean to actually have to enforce that mandate...But what Senator Obama is not saying is that he might have to do that too since he has a mandate in his plan for children, so he might have to go after parent’s wages if they don’t pay the health insurance premiums for their children.

Like him or not, Obama is wrong on this point.

ROVNER: Now, Senator Clinton makes the point that health insurance shouldn’t be any different than any other type of social insurance.

Sen. CLINTON: It would be as though Social Security were voluntary, Medicare, one of the great accomplishments of President Johnson was voluntary. I do not believe that is going to work.

BLOCK: Drawing a tie between what she is proposing for health insurance and programs that have long been accepted as part of our economic and social system.

ROVNER: Yes. And I think this is, you know, the remaining - one of the few differences, I think, between these two candidates is they go down the line toward these two very big primaries.