WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards wants to provide health care coverage for the 47 million people who currently lack it and reduce the cost of coverage for middle-class families.

The plan could cost up to $120 billion a year, and the candidate acknowledged it would require higher taxes.

"The bottom line is we're asking everybody to share in the responsibility of making health care work in this country. Employers, those who are in the medical insurance business, employees, the American people — everyone will have to contribute in order to make this work," the 2004 vice presidential nominee said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"Yes, we'll have to raise taxes. The only way you can pay for a health care plan that costs anywhere from $90 (billion) to $120 billion is there has to be a revenue source," the former North Carolina senator said.

Edwards said health care insurance premiums have risen 90 percent over the past decade.

"We want to make sure everybody's covered. We want to help middle-class families with the costs. We want to try to create competition that doesn't exist today," he said.

To accomplish all this, Edwards said he would expand Medicaid as well as a program that now provides coverage to 6 million people, mostly children. He would also provide federal health care subsidies. He said he wants employers to play a bigger role, either by offering coverage or buying into "health markets" that would include a government plan.

Edwards said he would free up money for health care coverage by abolishing President Bush's tax cuts for people who make more than $200,000 a year and by having the government collect more back taxes.

On the war in Iraq, Edwards sought to distinguish himself from one of the Democratic front-runners, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Edwards, who served on the Senate's intelligence committee, repeated earlier statements that his vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq was a mistake.

"My vote was wrong and I take responsibility for it," said Edwards.

Clinton, who also voted to authorize force, has said "there are no do-overs in life." She says Congress received bad information from the Bush administration going into the vote and she would have voted differently given what she knows now.

"If she believes that her vote was wrong, then yes, she should say so," Edwards said. "If she believes that her vote was right, then she should defend it."

BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 5, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/47982

A former North Carolina senator making a second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, John Edwards, has chosen not to embrace a single-payer health insurance plan, disappointing activists who contend that only a radical overhaul of the health care system can ensure that all Americans are insured.

During an appearance yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Mr. Edwards said he plans to announce details today of a plan that would result in universal coverage by building on the current employer-based system.

The Democratic nominee for vice president in 2004 said his plan would cost between $90 billion and $120 billion a year and would require a tax hike. "Yes, we'll have to raise taxes," he said. Mr. Edwards said he would roll back President Bush's income tax cut for Americans making more than $200,000, but he did not indicate if other taxes would also increase as the new plan was implemented.

"We take the 46 million, 47 million people who don't have health care coverage. We expand Medicaid. We provide subsidies for people who don't have coverage. We ask employers to play a bigger role, which means they either have to have coverage, or they have to buy into what we're calling health markets," Mr. Edwards said. He appeared to be describing what policy experts refer to as "pay or play" or an "employer mandate." In a bid to mollify liberal Democrats who back a single-payer system, Mr. Edwards highlighted the options for individuals to buy into new government-sponsored plans that would be set up in various regions of the country. "One of the choices, by the way, available in these health markets is the government plan. So people who like the idea of a single-payer insurer health plan, that is actually one of the alternatives that people can choose," he said.

"That's not the single payer we're talking about," a former director of Physicians for a National Health Program, Don McCanne, told The New York Sun. "That's way, way short of single payer."

During a speech in California in December, Mr. Edwards indicated that he and his advisers were mulling the idea of a single-payer system, akin to those used in Canada and Britain. "I think there's a legitimate debate that should take place on single payer versus building on the existing system. There are honestly good arguments on both sides of that debate," he said. "Those are the arguments that I'm taking into consideration as I'm trying to make my own decision."

Dr. McCanne said Mr. Edwards's comments on NBC yesterday dashed the hopes of single-payer advocates who were hoping that Mr. Edwards would embrace their goal. "It put us into a funk," he said.

A professor at Cornell's Weill Medical College who also supports single-payer insurance, Oliver Fein, said having a government plan compete with privately-run insurers could lead to significant problems. "The private insurance companies are likely to cherry pick in that setting to try to get healthy people to enroll with them and leave the really sick in the single-payer or government program," he said.

Aides to Mr. Edwards declined to answer questions about his plan until it is formally unveiled today. Mr. Edwards's decision to reject a single-payer plan leaves Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio as the only notable Democratic candidate supporting the concept. In an interview, he described as unworkable Mr. Edwards's notion of single-payer insurance within the existing system. "If you have a single-payer option, unless everybody's participating, you're not going to have resources to do it," the congressman said.

Critics of a single-payer system say it would lead to rationing of care, long waiting periods for certain procedures and surgeries, and could fail to deliver the cost savings promised by proponents of such plans.

However, Mr. Kucinich said he suspects that his colleagues are reluctant to back single-payer insurance out of fear that they will lose campaign donations from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

"It's not just Senator Edwards. All these Democratic candidates know full well this is a defining Democratic issue. They want to make it appear they are aligning themselves with the American people, and they want to get help from insurance companies in their campaigns," Mr. Kucinich said. "You can't have it both ways."

Perhaps to inoculate himself against such charges, Mr. Edwards railed against those interests during a speech Friday to the Democratic National Committee. "When it comes to 47 million of our own people who don't have health care, silence is betrayal," he said. "We cannot allow America's health care policy to be set by big insurance companies and big pharmaceutical companies."

Senator Clinton did not embrace the single-payer plan in her proposed 1993 health care overhaul. Senator Obama of Illinois backed a state-government single-payer plan as a state legislator, but more recently, he has expressed skepticism about the idea.

One person often rumored as a presidential candidate for 2008, Vice President Gore, endorsed the single-payer concept in 2002 but never delivered a promised speech laying out his views in detail. Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts supports the idea. Mr. Kucinich and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan have proposed Medicare-for-All legislation that would bring all Americans into the federal program.

A health-policy analyst who has advised President Clinton and Mrs. Clinton, as well as Messrs. Edwards and Obama, Christopher Jennings, said he would not be surprised to see a similar proposal from one of the second-tier Democratic presidential candidates. "Single-payer is very popular in our Democratic base," Mr. Jennings said, naming Senators Biden and Dodd as well as a former Iowa governor, Thomas Vilsack, as possible proponents of such a plan. "I don't necessarily see Obama or Hillary going there."

Mr. Jennings also said Mr. Edwards might quietly sell his plan as a stepping stone to a government-funded system. "What he's going to tell single-payer advocates is that this will become a single-payer plan, [that] everyone will eventually go there."

February 5, 2007 Edition > Section: National > Printer-Friendly Version

I heard this clip of him saying this last night on the radio and I was literally stunned.

We all kind of know that dems will raise taxes but didn't he remember what happened to Mondale?

Correction: It is NOT higher taxes for everyone. It is higher taxes for those who PAY taxes. There is a big difference.

__________________
Standing on the corner,
Suitcase in my hand,
Jack is in his corset and Jane is in her vest,
And me, I'm in a Rock & Roll band.

That is true. And in there somewhere, were he to be nominated and elected, I am sure there will be some exemption for the brave trial lawyers who channel the spirit of dead babies.

Maybe he could pay for these programs if he would take the billon of dollars in funds set aside for illegal immigrants that seem to carry more importance than the 2nd of the "two America's" he claims to care so much about.

At least he is being upfront about his desire to raise taxes......I can think of a lot of other politicians who were not so forthcoming

Your taxes will go up, but your healthcare premiums will go down. I'd prefer to send my healthcare money to the government than to the CEO's and shareholders of healthcare companies. That'll save 25% right off the top.

good point....

The healthcare premiums will not go down because you are assuming the government will know what to do with this "Universal healthcare". You are assuming that Edwards-if elected-will have the plan and the people inplace. You will assume that he will have the healthcare companies behind him offering the same quality of medicines and care despite the fact that research and development funds will be way down because the government will be subsidizing it. You are assuming that something of this magnitude can be handled by the government or the people running the government. You are assumming that Edwards prediciton of an annual cost of $90- $120 billion annually will be correct when you know it won't because government spending always goes above and over what is intended. This would not only crash the American economy but wound to a point that not even the 9/11 terrorists couldn't do. Tis plan if enacted would be the equivilant of a nuclear bomb going off in Ny, Chicago and L.A. It would be that bad.