WASHINGTON — Pleading with voters to give her another crack at overhauling the nation’s health care system, Senator Clinton is proposing a new plan that she says will cover all Americans without resorting to a “government-run” system that Republicans have been warning against for years.

In an address at an Iowa hospital yesterday, Mrs. Clinton detailed a proposal that would require all Americans to have health insurance while raising taxes on people making more than $250,000 a year to help subsidize coverage for many of the country’s estimated 47 million uninsured.

The plan’s estimated cost is $110 billion a year, although Mrs. Clinton earlier this year detailed a series of proposals aimed at reducing expenses in the health care bureaucracy to help pay for an expansion of coverage.

Her long-awaited plan yesterday drew reaction from across the political spectrum, and much of it underscored the battle that lies ahead for the former first lady, whose initial bid at health care reform failed spectacularly in 1994.

Democratic rivals welcomed her back to the health care debate while pointing to the similar plans they issued months ago. The leading Republican contenders, Mayor Giuliani and Mitt Romney, scoffed that “HillaryCare 2.0” would only add to big government bureaucracy. And a top lobbyist for the insurance industry scolded Mrs. Clinton for “divisive rhetoric” that she said was reminiscent of her first year in the White House.

Anticipating attacks from the critics who derailed her earlier efforts, the Clinton campaign sought to emphasize that the new plan was simpler than the one she presented in 1993. This was no 1,300-page document, just 10 pages of bullet points and footnotes. Advisers to Mrs. Clinton readily acknowledged that they “had not crossed the T’s and dotted all the I’s.”

In her speech, Mrs. Clinton said she had learned “valuable lessons” from her defeat during in the 1990s, chief among them the need to build a political consensus and present a proposal that’s “clear and easy to understand.” Her plan, she said, was “simpler, yet still doable.”

For all her talk of forging consensus, however, Mrs. Clinton’s pitch appeared to be impacted by the ambitious plans that her top competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Obama of Illinois and John Edwards of North Carolina, had laid out months before. Although Mrs. Clinton spoke earlier in her campaign of achieving universal coverage by the end of her second term in office, she has quietly hastened her plan. Yesterday, she pledged to enact her proposal by the end of her first term, matching the goal advanced by Mr. Obama.

In her speech yesterday, Mrs. Clinton also fired a pre-emptive shot at her critics across the aisle. “I know my Republican opponents will try to rephrase ‘health care for all Americans’ with ‘government-run health care,'” she said. “Well, don’t let them fool us again: This is not government-run.”

She said people who were satisfied with their current insurance would not be affected by her plan.

“The first rule of medicine is do no harm,” she added. “And we will do no harm to the parts of our system that are working.”

Mrs. Clinton characterized her proposal as a “public-private” partnership and compared it to the options that members of Congress have in health care. One would be a public plan similar to Medicare, while others would be private.

“My plan does not create a single new government department, agency, or bureaucracy,” she said. “It is not a government takeover of health care.”

The proposal, which the Clinton campaign is calling the “American Health Choices Plan,” would require large companies to provide insurance but not small businesses, a key opponent of the plan she spearheaded as first lady in 1993–1994. It also increases requirements on insurance companies and prevents them from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions.

Mrs. Clinton had harsh words for the insurance industry, calling some of their practices discriminatory and “immoral.” She acknowledged that the industry was unlikely to deem her its “woman of the year.”

The president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, Karen Ignagni, responded yesterday that while Mrs. Clinton had offered “important ideas” for making coverage more affordable, “unfortunately, some of the divisive rhetoric seems reminiscent of 1993.”

The Clinton plan would also provide tax credits to make health coverage more affordable and allow individuals to carry their insurance from job to job.

By including a mandate that every American be covered while stopping short of a nationalized “single-payer” system, Mrs. Clinton’s proposal is similar to that offered by Mr. Edwards in February. Mr. Obama’s plan requires that only children have insurance, although his campaign said it goes further in reducing costs for individuals and families.

Noting the similarity yesterday, Mr. Edwards said that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” But the former North Carolina senator has adopted a more confrontational approach to achieving universal coverage, and he criticized Mrs. Clinton for missing the point of her failure in the 1990s, when industry lobbyists helped kill her plan. “The lesson Senator Clinton seems to have learned from her experience with health care is, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them,'” Mr. Edwards said in a speech to the Laborers Leadership Convention in Chicago. “I learned a very different lesson from decades of fighting powerful interests — you can never join them, you just have to beat them.”

To that end, he announced yesterday that he would propose a law to end health coverage for the president, members of Congress, and political appointees within six months of his first day in office if Congress did not pass legislation enacting universal coverage.

Republican presidential candidates were quick to jump on Mrs. Clinton’s proposals. Mayor Giuliani’s campaign sent out a missive comparing her to a left-wing documentary filmmaker, Michael Moore, while Mitt Romney convened a press conference outside St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan to tell reporters that Mrs. Clinton would take America in the “wrong direction.” The hospital later sent out a statement assailing the former Massachusetts governor for using its headquarters as a campaign set piece.

One health policy scholar who emerged as a chief critic of Mrs. Clinton’s proposal in 1994, Elizabeth McCaughey, was keeping an open mind about her latest effort. A former lieutenant governor of New York, Ms. McCaughey published a detailed critique of that plan in the New Republic that was seen as a key factor contributing to its demise in Congress. She said she had not yet read Mrs. Clinton’s new proposal. “She is presenting it more modestly now,” Ms. McCaughey said. “The question is: Has she changed?”