In Second Push, Clinton Unveils Plan To Insure All

Pleading with voters to give her another crack at overhauling the nation’s health care system, Senator Clinton is proposing a 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 in Iowa today, Mrs. Clinton detailed a plan that would require all Americans to have health insurance while raising taxes on Americans making more than $250,000 to help pay for subsidizing many of the estimated 47 million individuals who lack coverage.The plan’s estimated cost is $110 billion a year. 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.Anticipating attacks from critics who mobilized against her attempt to overhaul the nation’s health care system in the 1990s, Mrs. Clinton sought to emphasize that her new plan was “simpler” and provided a range of affordable coverage choices for individuals.“Don’t let them fool us again. This is not government-run,” Mrs. Clinton said.She said that people who were satisfied with their current insurance would not be affected by her plan.“Part of our health care system is the best in the world, and we should build on it,” she said. “Part is broken, and we should fix it.”“We will do no harm to the parts of the system that are working,” Mrs. Clinton said,making reference the Hippocratic Oath, which instructs doctors to “do no harm.”She characterized her proposal as a “public-private” partnership and compared it to the health care options afforded to members of Congress. Part of the plan would be public, similar to Medicare, while other parts would be private.Mrs. Clinton’s proposal, which her campaign is calling the “American Health Choices Plan,” would require large companies to provide insurance but not small businesses, a group that opposed the plan she spearheaded as first lady between 1993 and 1994. It also puts new requirements on insurance companies and prevents them from denying coverage based on pre-existing health conditions.Mrs. Clinton’s two leading Democratic rivals, Senator Obama of Illinois and John Edwards of North Carolina, unveiled similar universal health care plans earlier this year.While the plans of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards each include a national mandate for individuals to have insurance, Mr. Obama’s proposal only requires children to be covered.Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton each say they intend to enact universal coverage by the end of their first term in office.Mr. Edwards has adopted a much more aggressive tone on health care in recent months. He sought to take his proposal a step further this morning by announcing he would propose a law to end health coverage for the president, members of Congress, and political appointees within his first six months in the White House if Congress failed to pass legislation enacting universal coverage.Whereas Mrs. Clinton has focused on a need to build consensus, Mr. Edwards is stressing confrontation. He suggested today that the former first lady had learned little from her failed health care bid in the 1990s.“The lesson Senator Clinton seems to have learned from her experience with health care is, ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,'” Mr. Edwards said in prepared remarks to the Laborers Leadership Convention in Chicago. “I learned a very different lesson from decades of fighting powerful interests: You can never join ‘em. You just have to beat ‘em.”Republican presidential candidates were quick to criticize 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 told a press conference in Manhattan that Mrs. Clinton would take America in the “wrong direction.”

In Second Push, Clinton Unveils Plan To Insure All

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