Comparison of Obama, Clinton and McCain's Health Care Plans and How They Rate to One North Carolinian

Health care remains a very large campaign issue for all three candidates. Everybody knows that the system is broken. But nobody seems quite sure how to go about fixing it. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain have some plans, but how valid are these plans? With so many without health care, and the general consensus being that health care is simply not affordable or, in some cases, obtainable, whose plan will work?

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have presented plans that many criticize for being too close to each other. In fact, there is technically only one major difference. Hillary Clinton has decided that the way to assure that all Americans have health care is to force all Americans to have health care. Barack Obama disagrees, offering the plan that only children will be mandated to have health care. However, although this is the portion of their plans that most people are focusing on, this hardly encompasses the whole deal.

Obama's plan, according to USAToday, is expected to cost over $50 billion a year. He expects to make up this sum by cutting back tax breaks to the wealthiest citizens. At base, Obama's plan is about affordability. He wants to make sure that health care costs and health care insurance remain feasible options for all Americans. A lofty goal in this time of health care crisis, but Obama feels secure in his thinking that health care insurance that is affordable will be obtained, even without mandates. Federal government employees currently have reasonable and affordable health care, and Obama purports to be able to make a plan like this available for all people. Subsidies would be offered to help pay for either the public plan or a private insurer. With so many health care scams around, Obama's plan to enact a Watchdog service over the private insurers seems practically a mandate in itself.

Clinton is less certain that access to affordable health care insurance will cause more people to sign up, so she's offering a different sort of reform in the form of mandates. Like auto insurance in North Carolina, health insurance may soon be mandatory. She plans to offer three basic options: staying on a current plan, signing up for a government plan, or signing up for a less-expensive Medicare-type plan. Many large companies already help pay for health insurance costs for their employees, but Clinton would make that compulsory. In North Carolina right now, health care insurance companies can and will deny access to health care if a person has ever been sick before. When signing up to individual or small group plans, it is permissible by state law to force people to fill out many page long health questionnaires. If you do not "pass," you do not get insurance, or you will be charged a premium sum, with the constant, looming threat that using health insurance will cause you to lose health insurance. Under Clinton's plan, private insurers will not be permitted to do this. Clinton's plan, being more sweeping, is quite a bit more expensive than Obama's at nearly double the expected price, but she plans to pay for it in the same way.

John McCain, the lone Republican candidate left, does not agree with either Clinton or Obama's plans. He says that he recognizes that there are issues with health care and affordability, and so plans to "give' Americans a $2,500 refundable tax credit to be used towards insurance. Like many Republicans, he is strongly opposed to "big government" and shies away from the notion that mandates or universal health care will get us out of the health care crisis. He has made noises that he would like to expand coverage to children whose families make too much for Medicaid but who still cannot afford health insurance, but his actions seem to speak otherwise. He has not precisely responded to how he will fund the refundable tax cuts, according to USAToday.

Ultimately, the only plan that looks like an absolute failure is McCain's. By throwing pennies at the problem, he can only hope for failure, though he will remain true to his desire to keep government out of the individual's business. Neither Obama's nor Clinton's plans offer the sort of sweeping reform that I had hoped to hear out of at least one of the candidates, but both offer some aid in a desperate time. So many Americans oppose government mandates that broad, sweeping health care like that seen in nearly every industrialized nation is nearly impossible. Clinton's mandates ignore that many Americans do not have health care because they simply cannot afford it. When one is living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to put food on the table, things like health care have to, by necessity, take a backseat. Mandating that this is not allowable cannot hope to fix the problem. On the other hand, Obama's plan is not sweeping enough. Bringing health care insurance costs down is great, but still doesn't fix the issue of all of these people without heath care insurance. However, both Clinton and Obama are moving towards an ultimate goal of improved health care, and that's what matters in the end.