Who's HC plan has the best chance at surviving?

[Quixote1818]

I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton's HC plan but I think I can see why she chose to go this direction. She is clearly afraid of cutting the powerful insurance companies out of the loop and risking them spending perhaps billions to defeat her program. This way she actually gets the insurance companies more money and probably gets them to back her plan. In 1993 the insurance industry staged a campaign against her plan.


While I don't care for the Clinton HC plan at all, I think I see why she designed it this way this time around. I think what the Clinton's understand is that some of these huge corporations just have too much power and you can't dismantle them all at once or they will go after you in a big way. If you can't beat them then join them but also get them to work at least somewhat toward your goals.

I don't like her plan but I think Hillary is smart for coming up with it.

So the question is: Is this the best plan that has a chance to get through or can a plan like Edwards survive? I much prefer Edward's plan but is he tilting at windmills within the current power structure in the US with such a bold plan?

[EVDebs]

1. Edward's plan lets insurance cos fail in the free market, competing against state plan

with built-in lower overhead costs. The GOP wanted that free market and he gives it to them. Those goldplated ins co plans can't compete with the state's 3% overhead costs.

[frazzled]

2. It really doesn't matter

First of all, there's barely a dime's worth of difference between the candidates' plans, and those will be all but erased in the legislative process. I'd like to just post parts of an op-ed that appeared a month or so ago in the NY Times that I think puts forth a very interesting argument about why all this policy nitpicking is a distraction. Read especially the part about each of the candidates' health-care plans back in 1992, and what happened:

While the absence of policy detail in the Republican presidential campaign is remarkable, Democrats go too far in the other direction. Their campaign has entered the season of plans, the period during which a barrage of 20-page policy proposals frames the debate. The candidates disappear behind a screen of white paper.

Elaborate policy proposals rarely get attention during a campaign — except when they are being used against the candidate as part of a furious nit-picking fight over details.

Eight years ago, I worked on Senator Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign. Mr. Bradley issued a detailed health plan, which got lost in a squabble with Vice President Al Gore over technical questions like whether the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program could provide services comparable to Medicaid.

Fighting over such minutiae served neither the Bradley candidacy nor the cause of universal health care. Yet here we go again, picking apart Barack Obama’s health plan, John Edwards’s poverty plan, Bill Richardson’s plan on climate change.

The explanation for these plans is that voters deserve to know what a candidate would do if elected president. But highly detailed plans don’t tell us that. Nor does the ability to assign some staffers to produce a plan indicate the skills necessary to serve as president. The plans put forward in the primaries are long forgotten by Inauguration Day.

That’s what happened after the Democratic primary-campaign battle over health plans in 1992. Bob Kerrey moved first, taking the left-wing position of support for a single-payer system. Paul Tsongas embraced the centrist, technocratic fix known as managed competition. Under pressure to produce a plan, Bill Clinton half-heartedly wrote one based on the “pay or play” idea, which would require employers either to cover all their workers or pay a tax.

But when Mr. Clinton, as president, unveiled his actual health plan more than a year later, it looked a lot like Mr. Tsongas’s. Meanwhile, Mr. Kerrey forgot his previous embrace of single-payer and became a critic from the right of President Clinton’s Tsongas-like plan. This isn’t evidence that politicians are deceitful or willfully break their promises. They were promises that shouldn’t have been made in the first place.

We don’t give our presidents total power to enact policy. They have to work with a Congress made up of people with their own views and constituencies. Does anyone really think that a plan cooked up by a bunch of smart 20-somethings after a couple of all-nighters amid the empty pizza boxes and pressures of a campaign is superior to what could be developed with the full resources of the federal government and open Congressional hearings and debate?

Democratic primary voters are infatuated with the idea of plans, not the plans themselves. We like to think that we vote based on our rational analysis of issues and ideas, not on such tawdry matters as personality. So we insist that candidates produce plans to show that they are as serious as we like to think we are. Voters mistakenly use the level of detail in a plan as a clue to the candidate’s level of commitment to solving a problem. But what we really need are clues to character.

[sandnsea]

3. Obama's has an insurance watch dog

"National Health Insurance Exchange to reform the private insurance market. Any
American could enroll in participating private plans, which would have to provide comprehensive
benefits, issue every applicant a policy, and charge fair and stable premiums."

I think this gives his plan the edge.

It also doesn't have personal mandates and provides subsidies instead of unknown tax cuts that never help working people anyway.

http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/HealthPlanFull.pdf