Democratic Presidential Candidate Obama Criticizes Health Care Proposal of GOP Presumptive Nominee McCain

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) on Saturday criticized the health care proposal of presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) as part of an effort to link McCain with President Bush, the Chicago Tribune reports. During a speech in Roseburg, Ore., Obama said that McCain "wants to give you the failed Bush health care policies for another four years." He added that McCain would "shred" the employer-sponsored health care system and leave U.S. residents to "fend for yourself" in the free market.

In response, Tucker Bounds, a spokesperson for McCain, said that Obama and Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) would "insert government bureaucracy into your medicine cabinet, while John McCain is committed to keeping America's top-quality doctors and reforming the system so that health care plans would be made available, accessible and affordable for families" (Tankersley, Chicago Tribune, 5/18).

Rx Industry Contributions
The pharmaceutical and some other industries that "bankrolled" the Bush campaign in the 2004 election cycle have contributed more to Obama and Clinton than to McCain in the current election cycle, Bloomberg/Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The Bush campaign in the 2004 election cycle received $516,839 from pharmaceutical industry employees and political action committees, compared with $280,688 for Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In the current election cycle, Obama and Clinton through the end of March each received almost $11 million from the four industries, compared with $6 million for McCain. Pharmaceutical industry employees and PACs contributed $339,729 to Obama, $262,870 to Clinton and $74,850 to McCain during the same period.

Republican consultant Eddie Mahe, a McCain supporter, said, "A significant percentage of your base Republican support, whether financial or otherwise, are not fans of McCain because of various things he's done or said or sponsored." During a Jan. 5 debate in New Hampshire, McCain "criticized the drug companies for high prices charged to the government's Medicare and Medicaid programs and said he backed importing cheaper drugs from Canada, a position also held by his Democratic opponents," Bloomberg/Inquirer reports (Salant, Bloomberg/Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/17).

Opinion Pieces
Summaries of two opinion pieces on health care issues in the presidential election appear below.

• Ronald Brownstein, National Journal: The "fork in the road" between the "fundamental and philosophical" differences in the health care proposals of the Democratic candidates and McCain "could not be starker," columnist Brownstein writes in a National Journal opinion piece. He adds, "The two sides are offering divergent visions about the basic role of health insurance in the nation's social safety net." According to Brownstein, Obama and Clinton would "encourage the sharing of risk between the healthy and the sick, even at the cost of requiring the former to subsidize the latter," and "McCain's proposal would maximize individual choice in obtaining coverage, even at the cost of reducing risk-sharing." Most analysts "think that, without the economic incentive" currently provided to employers that offer health insurance to employees, "some employers would drop coverage," Brownstein writes (Brownstein, National Journal, 5/17).
  
  
• Jonathan Cohn, Dallas Morning News: The McCain health care proposal, which would offer tax credits to encourage "people to drop their employer insurance and shop for coverage on their own," has "started to become a political liability" because "insurance companies generally won't offer coverage directly to people with 'pre-existing conditions,' since they represent such bad financial risks," Cohn, a senior editor at the New Republic, writes in a Morning News opinion piece. According to Cohn, McCain has announced a "Guaranteed Access Plan" to address the issue, and the proposal "all sounds very lovely -- unless you know something about health care policy, in which case, it sounds absolutely preposterous" (Cohn, Dallas Morning News, 5/19).