Candidate Review - Health Care - Hillary Clinton

This is one of the bigger issues; but I figure I'm going to have to do the hard one's sooner or later.

What will be interesting is that both Demcorats and Republicans do have different selling points. Democrats are assumed to be doing something about health care, so they have to be careful to assure voters that their plans won't be intrusive and won't be overly socialized. Republicans (which we'll get to on Thursday) are assumed to be opposed to socialized medicine, so have to convince America that they actually do care about health care (except for those who say nuts to the whole thing).

Anyway Clinton, as you might expect, balances this line pretty well, and is careful to stress the non-socialistic side of her plan.

Hillary's American Health Choices Plan covers all Americans and improves health care by lowering costs and improving quality. It speaks to American values, American families, and American jobs.

It puts the consumer in the driver's seat by offering more choices and lowering costs. If you're one of the tens of million Americans without coverage or if you don't like the coverage you have, you will have a choice of plans to pick from and that coverage will be affordable. Of course, if you like the plan you have, you can keep it.

She stresses that her plan is no threat to successful health plans that you might currently have; of course if you feel like your company health plan is a crappy, you can switch over to hers. Or to put it another way, in the marketplace of health insurance, the Government will now be a player. Not sure how that would work.

In striving to head off socialistic accusations, she underlines that her plan will be good for small businesses (almost certainly true) and will allow freedom of choice (we'll see, but probably true). I don't know if that will be enough, but then I don't know who those reassurances are aimed at. If they are aimed at Conservative Idealogues, well, Clinton could propose, word for word, the same plan as Mike Huckabee and they would call her a socialist. On the other hand if it's aimed at Middle America, giving them just enough coverage to buy into the plan, well that could work. We'll see.