Clinton's Middle Path on Health Care

Sept. 17, 2007 — -- New York Sen. Hillary Clinton's new proposal for universal health insurance aims to be bolder than the plan offered by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., while still being more pragmatic than her failed 1993-94 effort to reform the nation's health-care system.

"I hope the headline will read, 'Hillary is back and we're going to get it done this time,'" Clinton said last week during an online Democratic forum sponsored by Yahoo and the Huffington Post.

Clinton's proposal, which comes with a price tag of $110 billion per year, would require every American to carry health insurance and offer federal subsidies to help reduce the cost of coverage.

The plan would require large businesses to offer insurance or contribute to a government-run pool that would help pay for those not covered.

Clinton's inclusion of an individual mandate is a key difference with the plan offered earlier this year by Obama. The Illinois Democrat would only mandate that children have health insurance.

The purpose of requiring all individuals to have health insurance is to address the free-rider problem that occurs when emergency rooms, which are required under federal law to provide a certain level of treatment to everyone, are forced to treat a patient who is unable to pay.

When someone without insurance or ability to pay winds up in an emergency room, those costs shift to taxpayers as well as to those who have insurance.

Requiring everyone to have health insurance will impose new costs on those who can afford coverage but currently choose to go without it.

The goal, however, is to lower costs for those already in the system and to improve the level of preventive care going for the previously uninsured.