Now, as the Heritage Foundation will surely point out, the architecture of Mrs. Clinton’s plan is much more elaborate than the contours of the Butler proposal—which would not require insurance companies to accept everyone who applies for coverage at roughly the same price, and would not have expanded Medicare as an option for individual coverage.
Yet by folding the Heritage proposal into her own new plan—and by simultaneously adopting aspects of the Massachusetts and California universal-coverage plans—Mrs. Clinton is shielding herself against the inevitable barrage from both partisan and corporate adversaries. How radical is a plan that echoes the Heritage Foundation, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney?
Of course, Mr. Romney is running away from the health care innovations he helped bring to the Bay State, just as he no longer remembers when he was an advocate of gay rights and reproductive freedom. Like Rudolph Giuliani, he seized upon Mrs. Clinton’s health initiative to warn once more against federal bureaucracy, socialized medicine, big government and all the other scary things supposedly symbolized by “Hillarycare.”
Such frightening phrases have repeatedly terrified American voters into submission to the insurance industry, but they may have lost much of their power. Corporate advertising and Republican rhetoric rolled over Mrs. Clinton in 1994, but she has come back to fight again for this Democratic promise with greater wisdom and experience.
Voters are likely to respect and appreciate her perseverance, and they are also likely to regard her plan with open minds, regardless of the negative propaganda that will no doubt engulf us all. Ever since Harry S. Truman first proposed universal health care in 1948, the insurance industry has refused to create a system that would cover everyone, erecting instead a nightmarish edifice of corporate bureaucracy, unaffordable waste and cruel exclusion.
Rather than rant against the constructive alternatives, let them—and their political mouthpieces—explain why we should continue to tolerate their failure.
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