Elizabeth Edwards Links Current Economic Downturn With Problems in U.S. Health Care System

Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former Democratic presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), on Tuesday linked the current economic downturn with problems in the U.S. health care system, the AP/Kansas City Star reports. Elizabeth Edwards, who has incurable cancer, has made several recent public appearances in support of efforts to expand health insurance to all residents.

During a conference call on Tuesday, she said that problems with payments of medical bills often lead to home foreclosures, a major factor in the current economic downturn. Elizabeth Edwards also said that residents without health insurance often are less productive because they miss work as a result of a lack of access to preventive care or early treatment for illnesses. She said, "Reform of our health care system is a very important part of the answers we're going to need to solve our economic woes."

In addition, Elizabeth Edwards advocated for a requirement that all residents obtain health insurance. She added that a proposal by Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) to replace an income tax break for employees who receive health insurance from employers with a refundable tax credit of as much as $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families to purchase coverage through their employers or the individual market would not address the fundamental problems with the health care system and would not benefit the average family. Elizabeth Edwards said, "Sen. McCain's health care plan is truly a radical health care plan," adding, "It's rooted in free-market ideology, but it is nothing related to actually being free because it's going to cost the American public at every turn."

Mario Diaz, a McCain spokesperson, said, "While we agree with Mrs. Edwards that there needs to be immediate action to reform health care, Sen. McCain believes patient's choice -- not costly government mandates -- will provide better health care at a lower cost for every American" (Baker, AP/Kansas City Star, 9/30).

Health Care Proposals Examined
The San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday examined the health care proposals of the major presidential candidates and their philosophies on the issue.

According to the Chronicle, both McCain and Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) "agree that our current health care system isn't working" and that "the country needs to reduce the ranks of the 46 million uninsured and provide alternatives to job-based insurance," but "any similarities between the presidential hopefuls' health reform proposals pretty much stop there." Both proposals "come at a cost, the details of which remain murky," and "the promise of health care reform seems all the more questionable -- at least for the foreseeable future -- given the current economic meltdown," the Chronicle reports.

Len Nichols, a health economist with the New America Foundation, said, "The cost of doing nothing just got higher if more and more people are losing their jobs," adding, "People really want security, and part of economic security is having your health care."

Sherry Glied, an economist who chairs the health policy and management department at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, said, "The McCain plan is completely untried. There is no country in the world that has this plan. All bets are off."

Gary Claxton, a Kaiser Family Foundation vice president and director of the Health Care Marketplace Project at the Foundation, said that Obama "is trying to provide some form of universal health insurance."

Kaiser Family Foundation President and CEO Drew Altman said that McCain and Obama "have fundamentally different opinions of what insurance should do," adding that voters should examine the philosophies of their proposals, rather than the details, which likely will change as the plans move through the legislative process. He said, "You can be sure neither plan will ever be enacted into law" without changes (Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle, 10/1).

Editorial, Opinion Piece
Summaries of a recent editorial and opinion piece that addressed health care issues in the presidential election appear below.

• Daytona Beach News-Journal: McCain "aims to radically change the way health care insurance works" through a proposal to replace an income tax break for employees who receive health insurance from employers with a refundable tax credit without "aiming for universal care," but the plan is "simply not realistic" and "doesn't add up," a News-Journal editorial states. According to the editorial, McCain "is assuming that 'empowering' individuals to buy their own insurance would discipline them to look for the better rates while compelling the market to compete for customers with cheaper rates -- assumptions proven wrong year after year." The editorial states, "The uninsured aren't shopping around for what they can't afford to start with; they won't shop around for what's still essentially unaffordable." In addition, the editorial states, "Without the tax benefit, employees are just as likely to opt out of employee coverage, which would jack up premiums for the rest and ultimately swell the ranks of the uninsured, not reduce them." Meanwhile, Obama has proposed to "build on the existing system to make health coverage universal," the editorial states, adding, "Obama's plan isn't perfect" and might "not even be 100% universal," but at least "that's what it aims for." The editorial concludes, "Obama's plan looks for practical ways to make the best of existing systems work better, with key innovations. It neither reinvents the system nor breaks it. But it comes close to curing it of its most unacceptable disease: Lack of insurance for all" (Daytona Beach News-Journal, 9/30).
  
  
• Merrill Matthews, Wall Street Journal: The "initial evidence" that Obama "understands more about financial markets than he does about health insurance markets ... isn't promising," as he does not support a proposal favored by McCain to allow residents to purchase health insurance across state lines, Matthews, executive director of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance and a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation, writes in a Journal opinion piece. According to Matthews, although Obama has said that such a proposal would lead to an "unsafe, unregulated" health insurance market, "interstate coverage options" that currently are available have resulted in "almost no problems." He adds, "So why are the two presidential candidates fighting about expanding interstate health insurance options?" Matthews writes that Obama opposes the purchase of health insurance across state lines because "he doesn't believe a market can work in health insurance" without government oversight and he "likes benefit-rich policies that cover virtually everything but are also very expensive." Matthews writes, "Creating an interstate option for individuals to purchase health insurance doesn't solve every problem faced by the 45 million Americans who are uninsured," adding, "But the choice isn't between a regulated or unregulated health insurance market. The choice is between an overregulated market favored by Mr. Obama and a regulated market favored by Mr. McCain that provides more options to help individuals afford health coverage" (Matthews, Wall Street Journal, 10/1).