I was pleased to see that Wesley Clark’s health care proposal, unveiled yesterday, has been well received.
In a nutshell, Clark proposes that the nation eliminate the Bush tax cuts on Americans making more than $200,000 a year and use some of the money — about $70 billion annually — to expand health insurance to about 32 million people. Clark’s plan focuses heavily on health care for children, by proposing mandatory insurance for Americans under the age of 18 and offering tax credits to low-income families who can’t afford it for their kids.
While I’d encourage anyone interested in the plan to check out the details at Clark’s site, I was particularly pleased to see The New Republic, which has been awfully tough on the general lately, bring attention to a key facet to the Clark health care plan.
To be sure, it’s difficult at this stage in the process to break new ground on health care policy. Gephardt, Edwards, Dean, Kerry, and Lieberman have already unveiled their health care plans, and most contain similar features.
As TNR’s Jonathan Cohn noted, “Each candidate has the same set of informal policy advisors, culled from the ranks of former Clinton-Gore officials and prominent research universities. These policy advisors, in turn, agree on the best way to increase access to health insurance in the current political environment: Focus on children first; expand public programs that cover the poor directly; offer more affluent Americans subsidies through the tax code, then allow them to buy into the Federal Employees’ insurance plan with its affordable group rates.”
Clark, to his credit, found a point his rivals hadn’t emphasized.
“The most novel feature of the Clark plan, though, may be its focus on improving the quality of health care,” Cohn explained. “All of the candidates have paid lip service to this notion, but Clark has gotten more specific. Among other things, Clark would establish a commission to develop quality treatment guidelines, require all federal programs to abide by them, and then — in what seems like a pretty aggressive move — demand that private insurers follow if they want to keep receiving any tax subsidies.
“If Clark ever got to be president and tried to implement such a scheme, conservatives would howl about all the unnecessary regulation. But Clark has a pretty good retort: He merely wants to do for all Americans what the military already does for its soldiers. The military has been aggressively promoting prevention and quality care for years, figuring it’s better to make sure soldiers don’t get sick rather than treat them once they are.
“Clark used this language in his speech on Tuesday: ‘It seems to me that just as our soldiers can’t do their jobs without adequate health care, our families shouldn’t be expected to do their best jobs without adequate health care, either.’ And at least some experts are impressed: ‘The rhetoric is stronger than any other candidate I’ve seen, and it relates to his personal experience,’ says one well-respected policy analyst who advises Democrats. ‘He really thinks there needs to be much more emphasis on prevention and quality.'”