More On The Clinton Plan

Ezra Klein has the best roundup, as expected, of Hillary Clinton's health care plan. This is becoming almost a requirement for a Democratic candidate, but because it's Hillary and because of her history with the issue, it's getting a lot of coverage. So it's good to see some genuinely progressive ideas in there. Yes, there's an individual mandate, but there's enough cost containment to make that very palatable.

It does open the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program to everybody, ensuring that anyone can access the same menu of regulated private options that federal employees get. FEHBP is the program that already insures millions of current government employees, including the members of Congress, by offering a variety of regulated private options to choose from. Throwing the doors to that program wide open is the most basic and ubiquitous of coverage solutions.

More importantly, the plan also creates a new public insurance option, modeled off, but distinct from, Medicare. That's a big deal: The public insurer offers full coverage and is open to all Americans without restriction. Public insurance is what I feared her plan would avoid, and instead, she embraced it wholeheartedly [...]

And if you don't go through the newly expanded FEHBP or the public option, preferring to keep your current insurance, you'll still be dealing with a heavily-regulated and reformed insurance industry, which can no longer price discriminate based on preexisting conditions or demographic characteristics, refuse you coverage, or deny renewal of your policy -- including if you change your job. So if you like your current insurance but quit your cubicled existence at MegaCorp, your insurer can't drop you. All this matters because it keeps the private programs from having too much capacity to undercut the risk pools of the other options. It also destroys the elements of the insurance industry's business model that rely too explicitly on screwing you over.

There's more at Ezra's place. This is all great for the Democratic Party because it defines us as a p[arty of ideas on the most pressing domestic issue the country faces. While this isn't single payer, it's pretty innovative and would be a significant improvement from the crisis we face now.

Clinton had a lot of success in 1994 coming up with a health care plan. Getting it passed was the problem, and John Edwards' camp is hitting at her on that strategy, claiming that Clinton is too wedded to insurance and drug company interests to get much of this through the Congress. He contrasts her with this proposal:

"To show Congress just how serious I am, on the first day of my administration, I will submit legislation that ends health care coverage for the president, all members of Congress, and all senior political appointees in both branches of government on July 20th, 2009 - unless we have passed universal health care reform," Edwards said in a speech to the Laborers Leadership Convention.

Legislation which has about as much a chance of passing as Libyan statehood. But the point is that Edwards will bring tremendous grassroots pressure to bear to get the job done on health care. And I think that's a nice point of contrast. Barack Obama did something similar by calling for an open process to change the system, hitting her on the closed nature of the 1994 attempt that really pissed off Congress. (I guess Obama had his health care plan made via wiki, right?).

Of course, the real contrast all these Presidentials should be making with Hillary is not on health care. It's on the war in Iraq, and the fact that she's the only candidate not to announce that the only acceptable bill moving forward to fund the war is one that includes a timeline for withdrawal. Chris Dodd hit her hard on this today. The leverage gained from having a united Democratic front on a timeline would be immeasurable. Once again, Clinton is talking about what she would do if she were in charge but not a strategy to get it done and to get it done right now. Sooner or later this will catch up to her.