2008: Seven Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate Health Care

Marc Cooper reports that John Edwards dominated the series of presentations by seven Democratic presidential candidates in Las Vegas Saturday sponsored by the Service Employees Union and the Center for American Progress (Edwards Stands Out On Health Care Debate, The Nation). While all the contenders "vowed to provide universal coverage if elected, only John Edwards presented a plan with any significant details."

Edward's personal difficulties and his work on poverty in America have made him think hard about the issue of health care. Although you might find his plan unnecessarily complex, it does have the virtue of being specific, a long step toward converting the platitudinous promise of universal health care into policy. Edwards, who has been speaking about the issue for months, has made health care the defining issue of his campaign.

Hillary Clinton, who can't be accused of not having given health care a lot of thought, "was more vague in how she would achieve universal coverage. She put her emphasis instead on ending the 'discrimination' exercised by insurance companies when they exclude or disenroll policyholders. 'Every health insurance company will have to insure everybody with no exclusions for pre-existing conditions,' she said." While this sounds like she's being tough on the insurance industry, it should be noted that, like the Clinton administration health plan, Hillary's emphasis puts the insurance business at the center of any "reform" and that insurance companies have been among the biggest contributors to her campaign.

Cooper quotes a high-ranking West Coast SEIU official, speaking off the record, as saying tellingly that, "If the election were held today, we'd be supporting Edwards. When he comes into town he asks what he can do for us. Hillary asks us what we can do for her."

Barack Obama, who so far seems to be running as a stand-in for Mr. Rogers, was characteristically platitudinous. Instead of concrete proposals, he listed a number of "principles" that would guide him toward covering all Americans. "The basic principles," he said, "are everybody is in it, there has to be more money for prevention, and some form of pooling of costs and risks. If we have another forum in a few months and my plan is still not on my website, I will be in trouble."

As he has been from the beginning of the campaign, Edwards is the only candidate who is honest about the cost of setting up universal health care -- estimated by his campaign as between $90-120 billion, and about the need for taxes to pay for it. Senator Obama didn't rule out raising taxes, saying he would do "whatever it takes" to get universal coverage by the end of his first term.

Richardson, Dodd, Gravel and Kucinich also made presentations -- Biden, who wasn't there, may have decided that decisions about national health care are a little above the SEIU's pay grade. The usually forthright Richardson, who at other venues has suggested universal health care can be funded through cost-cutting measures, said he would pay for coverage by using the billions now spent in Iraq, as if those expenditures weren't already being met with deficit spending. Kucinich, who supports a single-payer system, offered no details about how it would work or be paid for.

Kucinich got off the most quoted line of the day, however: "You need a president who didn't fall out of a Christmas tree," he said. "You need a president who doesn't have a key in the back being wound up by special interests."

See Impractical Proposals: "Update: Progress on Single-Payer Universal Healthcare"