Seven of 10 Likely Democratic Voters in Pennsylvania Concerned About Health Care Costs, Poll Finds

About 70% of likely voters in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary have concerns about their ability to afford health care, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, the Wall Street Journal reports.

According to the poll, voters ranked health care as their third most important issue in the election after the economy and the war in Iraq. Among voters who cited health care as their most important issue in the election, 56% said that they supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), and 38% said that they favored Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

According to the Journal, Clinton is "adopting a battle plan reminiscent of the one James Carville and Paul Begala used to boost underdog Democrat Harris Wofford into the Senate in 1991 and adapted a year later to help propel Bill Clinton to the presidency" with a focus on health care and the economy. Wofford "stunned the political world when he defeated former Gov. Dick Thornburg, a well-known moderate Republican who had resigned as U.S. attorney general to seek the seat," the Journal reports. The Journal also notes that Obama intends to give a speech on the economy Thursday followed by a six-day bus tour in Pennsylvania (Timiraos, Wall Street Journal, 3/27).

Organ Transplants
In a Tuesday interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial board, Clinton discussed how her proposal to require all U.S. residents to obtain health insurance would increase access to organ transplants.

According to a recent Tribune-Review investigation, hundreds of people each year receive liver transplants when they do not need them and one in 10 patients die when they could have lived longer without the transplant. Clinton said, "The question of transplants is extremely sensitive because it's not only people maybe getting them when they are not critically ill, but also a hospital looking at, 'Do we give a transplant to the uninsured person and eat all that cost, or do we give a transplant to a highly insured person?'"

In addition, Clinton said, "Of course, now doctors are told by insurance companies who they can transplant and who they can't." She added, "It has been, I think, a rude awakening for a lot of doctors. They rightly didn't want the government telling them, and I don't want the government telling them, but they have another bureaucracy, namely the health insurers, telling them."

According to Claude Earl Fox, director of the Florida Public Health Institute and former administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration, an expansion of health insurance to all residents could increase access to organ transplants but also could raise demand for organs without an increase in supply. He said, "The big benefit I could see to universal coverage would be that it could potentially make access to transplants more egalitarian, less dependent on economic status and more dependent on medical status" (Conte/Fabregas, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 3/26).