Envisioning the Future: The 2008 Presidential Candidates’ Health Reform Proposals

This report from Commonwealth Fund analyzes the health care proposals of eight Democratic and Republican 2008 presidential candidates—Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Dennis Kucinich, John McCain, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney. Their approaches to health insurance reform fall into three categories: 1) proposals that emphasize tax incentives for obtaining insurance through the individual market (Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, Romney); 2) proposals that build on existing private and public group insurance with shared responsibility for financing coverage (Clinton, Edwards, Obama); and 3) proposals that aim to cover everyone through publicly sponsored insurance systems like Medicare (Kucinich). The report examines differences among the proposals, and evaluates them against key principles like affordability, provision of essential services, financial protection, streamlined administration, and fair financing. Links to full report, chart pack, issue brief and news release

The Democrats’ Strategic Challenge

The Democrats’ Strategic Challenge. Paul Starr. The American Prospect. January 14, 2008.

“The key difference among the candidates is that both Clinton and Edwards would require everyone to carry insurance coverage, while Obama would require coverage only for children. Without an individual mandate for adults, however, other aspects of Obama’s plan collapse. Insurers cannot be required to ignore pre-existing conditions if people can just wait to buy coverage anytime they’re sick. Obama claims to want to bring the costs down first in order to make coverage affordable, but his plan would make insurance more expensive by giving healthy people an incentive not to pay for it until they need it.

Obama’s opposition to an individual mandate, however, is probably symptomatic of a wider reluctance to require people to pay for health insurance and indicates how difficult it will be to get the 60 votes in the Senate needed to pass universal coverage. Even if he is not the next president, the Illinois senator may well have established the outer limits of what a new administration can hope to accomplish in health care in its first two years. The Democrats carry a peculiar historical burden on the issue. The next Democratic president, especially another Clinton, cannot afford to propose a comprehensive reform plan and come up with nothing. There has to be an achievable Plan B.”  Full article.