On September 17, 2007 Presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton weighed in with her proposal, “the American Health Choices Plan” (“the Plan”), which according to Senator Clinton “expands personal choice, but keeps costs down.”
Key features of the Plan include an “individual mandate,” which requires all Americans to acquire health insurance, combined with tax subsidies to make the required insurance more affordable. Most employers would have to either offer health coverage to their employees, or else contribute to a government pool that would help fund coverage for the uninsured. The uninsured would have the choice of purchasing coverage from one of two governmental programs — the Medicare program or the federal employees health benefit plan. Those plans would be expanded as necessary to accommodate the new enrollees.
Senator Clinton stated that the Plan’s $110 billion cost would be financed by the savings that would accrue from her Plan as opposed to the current health care system, and by rolling back President Bush’s tax cuts for those Americans with an annual income in excess of $250,000.
Senator Clinton’s Plan has already drawn criticism from Republicans. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for example, has stated that Senator Clinton “takes her inspiration from European beaucracies” and “fundamentally does not believe in the markets and in the states.” (When he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney participated in developing the health reform legislation which requires all Massachusetts residents to have health insurance, but does not include such a mandate in his presidential platform.)
Senator Clinton proposed a similar although more complicated health care plan in 1993-1994, which was shot down by critics claiming it would impose governmental oversight of health care decisions, to the detriment of patient choice. She states that the Plan reflects lessons learned from the failure of the previous proposal, and indeed her discussions of the Plan (as well as its name) reflect repeated emphasis on the notion of consumer choice. The candidate’s press release describing the Plan can be reviewed here.
